Does anybody buy a new camcorder these days? I did!
Canon VIXIA HF R800: This camera is way smaller than I expected which I liked. Why buy a camcorder when all these years we've been shooting our videos with smartphones which have amazing cameras! The Vixia has a powerful 32X optical zoom and something called 57X advanced optical. Charging the battery on the VIXIA HF R800 is long - 6 to 7 hours, but you can run it from AC with the supplied cable. However, the battery will not charge while you're using the camera via AC. As you see in this week's show, even though it got 4.2 stars out of 5 from over 300 reviews on Amazon, I was very disappointed in the quality of the video. Indoors, even with all our studio lights on, the video still looked darkish. It was better outdoors, but the video quality just doesn't equal what a modern day smartphone can do. (We've been mostly using an LG G6 for our videos and they've been great, but zooms on smartphones are so great.) Also on Amazon quite a few people said it's hard to use the foldout view screen in sunlight, a common complaint on many LCD screens. The biggest flaw in my camera? A few times it stopped recording because of an error something like "couldn't write to the SD card fast enough", even though I had one of the most recommended cards in the camera. Sadly, when that notice comes up - everything recorded up to that point disappears! At a wedding, graduation, etc., that would be a disaster. I'm returning my camera because of that. UPDATE: I haven't tried this yet, but after searching the web about this problem I found some valuable info on the Canon Forum website. It seems it occurs when people use a micro SD card in an adapter to record to. That's what I was using. But, as someone in a post pointed out, no where in the 288 page Canon Manual does it mention that you shouldn't use a micro SD card in an adapter. However many people reported that switching to a full-size Canon recommended SD card did solve the problem. Will it? I guess I'll give it a try.
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March 29, 2019 
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