SAcamera Blog - Digital Photography, Reviews, Tech-Talk, Events and Customer Gallery

The Canon Legria HF21 has a 2,7 inch LCD, widescreen, with 112,000 pixels and is able to swivel around to face multiple directions.

Set to the lowest quality for recording, the Canon Legria HF21 easily holds over 24 hours of high definition recording with its dual-flash memory totalling 64 gigs of space.  At the highest setting of 24 megabits per second you will have a total of 6 hours recording time which is still plenty space for recording your family holiday. There are four recording quality settings, so pick the one that is most appropriate for the situation.

A great thing about the Canon Legria HF21 is that the footage is stored onto very widely used and commonly available SD or SDHC cards. These are the cards that are used in most digital still cameras and able to plug directly into a large number of laptops. This makes sharing and distributing your video a lot easier.

The Legria’s flash memory makes a great choice for this camcorder as this kind of memory uses a considerably less amount of battery life than hard drive memory does, making that 24 hour recording space a nice availability.

This camcorder is packed with really fantastic features. Dynamic Optical Image Stabilisation assist you in reducing camera shake and does so with more efficiency when using the wide angle lens than previous models managed. This feature made a positive impact on footage recorded while moving around, when there was no tripod in use.

Face Detection on the Legria HF21 can detect up to 35 faces in a frame and if set to do so; will automatically ensure that the settings are ideal for ensuring natural, radiant skin tones.

You have the option of rather setting your Canon Legria HF21 to track just one face, this makes filming a single person in a crown a lot easier as the camcorder will always favour them for focus and lighting settings.

Low Light Shooting is made easy with a new mode aimed specifically for shooting at night time. The images stay clear and noise is kept to a minimum.

A feature called Enhanced Video Snapshot will record four second burst of video which can help you capture a goal being scored or wildlife in action. If need be, the four second clips can be merged to create one longer clip.

The Canon Legria HF21 is powered by Canon’s very special 3.3 megapixel CMOS Sensor helps to create smooth and crisp images with an amazing clarity and also plays a role making the low light recording possible, along with Canon’s Instant Auto Focus. A note to mention is that the Legria HF21 also performs very well in very bright conditions, like the beach or snowy areas, there was no ‘lighting distortion’ and the videos came out very well.

The Legria HF21 has a 15x optical zoom and weighs in at only 340 grams, making this a very lightweight camcorder. The body is compact and really the camcorder is really comfortable to hold and handle.

The body of the Canon Legria HF21 has space to for microphones and headphones and there is a Canon “S” Mini Advanced accessory shoe (neatly hidden behind a plastic flap)

All of your manual settings are changeable at the controls around your LCD, very easy and quick access. A joystick takes you to and through the menu system which gives you access to the most frequently used options (like your video light, exposure, manual focus etc). Manual focus is operated via the joystick which can be a little tricky, but once you become accustomed to this is it runs smoothly.

The Canon Legria HF21 has a Pre-Record function which continuous records and discards 3 seconds of recording so that when you hit the record button the camcorder is already 3 seconds ahead of you, ensuring that you don’t miss anything. Just be warned that this feature does use a lot of battery power.

All in all a brilliant camera for capturing your special moments with friends and family, easy to use, comfortable to handly and lightweight and compact to carry with you.