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DV cameras keep falling in price, and Canon´s MV850i is one of the cheapest we´ve seen. It is aimed at first-time buyers and promises ease of use, which extends as far as the slide button on the side marked with an Easy setting. We did most of our testing in this mode and it performed well, giving us a well-balanced image.
Deactivating the Easy mode gives you a choice of preset shooting modes, including sports, portrait and low light. Beyond this you can take manual control of the shutter speed and white balance, along with other settings. Button layout is excellent with the most useful controls, such as the zoom, close to hand. Best of all, the many controls are well labelled and often self-explanatory.
When you switch on the MV850i it starts up almost instantaneously: by the time you´ve opened the 2.4" LCD screen it is ready to use. The screen
provides a good estimation of the results you´ll get on tape, but as usual the viewing angle is quite tight.
A simple switch changes between SD card and DV tape. The stills performance is not great, taking pictures at a resolution of only 1,024x768. You can also record low-resolution movies to the SD card, but we can´t see why you´d want to.
Picture quality to DV is generally good, thanks in part to the 22x optical zoom lens. The image is both sharp and colourful, although it deteriorates when you move the camera, resulting in picture noise and some purplish fringing on objects. Another issue is that it doesn´t focus as quickly as more expensive models we´ve seen, which makes for a noticeable delay when there is a change of depth in the shot.
The MV850i has a proper 16:9 anamorphic mode for recording in widescreen if you prefer, which can lend your home movies a more cinematic feel if you have a matching display that can deal with an anamorphic picture. There is also a bundled wide-angle lens that screws on to the front of the Canon and is equally useful for group shots indoors as it is for dramatic landscapes outdoors.
This is a well-built and well-designed mini DV camera. It seems that the DV camera is coming to a halt in terms of design innovation and models are becoming increasingly hard to differentiate. For the price the picture quality is very good, making this an excellent choice for the first-time buyer.
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