Last June, with the birth of my son forthcoming, I hit the market for a video camera. We were also ready for a new compact as my old faithful Fuji S602Z is a bit too large for travel. I’d watched the market for months in anticipation of the Canon TX1, a hybrid boasting a very compact form factor and HD video capabilities. I’ve been very pleased with this camera. We’ve taken thousands of pictures, and hundreds of videos. It’s not perfect. The flash leaves a lot to be desired, and it doesn’t handle low light well. But, given good light and plenty of digital storage space, it’s a great camera offering excellent AV quality, great still shots, and it’s the size of a deck of cards.

One feature I’ve grown to appreciate (thanks to the Fuji) is black and white macros. They’re pretty good on the TX1, but I only discovered my newest favorite feature recently. They can also be enabled for video recording. This allows amazingly clear close-up videos. Here’s my first test, which coincidently resulted in a nice tribute to my oldest cat Coltrane.

YouTube takes quite a bit from the quality, but the original footage was a 600MB file, which is difficult to distribute on the web.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.