Handheld DV goes widescreen

THE MV960, flagship model in Canon's new range of DV camcorders, is a true widescreen camera.

Its CCD has a widescreen (16:9) aspect ratio, allowing it to record in widescreen, without having to chop off parts of the picture, or resort to other trickery to get a widescreen image, writes Anthony Dhanendran.

This makes it far more useful for the growing number of people with widescreen televisions and computer monitors - though the MV960 can also switch to 4:3 mode (this does result in a slight drop in quality).

The camcorder comes with DV-in (in the form of a mini-Firewire port) as well as DV-out, which means it's possible to record footage back to the camera once it's been edited. Since this is performed digitally, there's no loss in quality.

There's also a whopping 25x optical zoom, allowing you to get close up to the action. At that magnification though, you will need a tripod or firm base to avoid camera shake.

If you should run out of tape, both images and footage can be saved to an SD card, which is inserted into a slot at the side of the camera.

Another good feature of the MV960 is that it's easy to use. Starting to shoot is simply a case of popping in the tape, switching it on and pressing the record button.

Video quality is good, with in an occasional slight coating of noise on the image, which is really only a problem in low light conditions. A powerful white LED mounted on the front of the camera can be used to illuminate a subject, but we didn't find it to be of much use. It's too weak for most situations and tended to give people an unfortunate ghostly blue cast.

Those minor qualms aside, however, anyone who wants to shoot in widescreen will be hard-pressed to find a cheaper camera that produces video this good.

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