Canon DC20

Canon’s DC20 makes capturing and editing video easy, with or without a PC. By recording directly to 8cm DVDs, your footage can be played back immediately in a domestic DVD player or computer.

It also doubles as a 2megapixel digital camera with flash and a full selection of shooting modes. The DVD format offers many advantages over tape.

You don’t have to fast-forward or rewind, nor do you need to worry about accidentally recording over footage. You can also manipulate and edit your data without time-consuming and laborious transfers from tape to PC.

Although compact and convenient to use, the DC20 has a vast array of functions, allowing you to organise and edit video clips, with video effects, basic titling and chromakeying.

You can then remove the disc from the camera and play it back in your DVD player. The supplied Roxio Mydvd LE software provides extra DVD authoring capabilities on a PC.

With the included write-once media, the disc must be finalised before it can be read in a PC or DVD player. This takes about 10 minutes and, once performed, prohibits further recording on the disc. To realise the full power of the DC20 you’ll need to buy DVD-RW discs, which cost about £8 each.

Although the range of features is impressive, we were a little disappointed with the image quality.

Indoor shots showed considerable digital noise in both still and video modes, while compression artefacts were clearly evident during outdoor shoots. The supplied battery pack will only last for about 35 minutes of recording and takes two and a half hours to charge.

This camcorder is well designed and packed with features, but we would have expected a little better from Canon in terms of video quality.