Canon VIXIA HF-R52 HD Digital Camcorder 1080p with 32GB, Wi-Fi, and 3-Inch LCD (Black)

I've owned this for close to 2 years now and I've had a lot of time to really think about a solid opinion and it's pretty simple. This has some decent hardware behind it, but the software options are hindering what you can do.If you take a lot of video in bright light or outside this camera is great. In daylight everything is great, but since I bought this to record our (now) 2 year old son then outside is not where a lot of the video is from. So what's it like inside, mediocre. For those familiar with a good digital camera that offers some level of manual control this camera will grate on you. I've tried my best to not resent the fact that I could make it take a better picture if I had access to all the controls all the time, but I digress.My two major issues are the white balance and aperture/contrast settings. The auto white balance function is slow, especially in low light. Slow as in 15-30 seconds before you shift from a very red hue to something more skin colored. Again in bright light it works great, but inside in a medium lit room it will take a noticeable amount of time to shift to a decent color range. Now there is an option to set your white balance manually, and you can have that active/available on the lcd so it's not hard to get to. Now this couples into the aperture issue as well. In lower light this camera does have a high level of "noise". I think what's going on here is a software compensation to make every scene appear at X level of brightness. So as the overall scene brightness falls the software ramps up the aperture settings to max - and then I believe it starts some level of software contrast bumping (the reason I also feel it's software based is you start to loose color definition as well). You can manually lock the aperture/scene brightness, this means at times things may get darker but you'll get a lot less noise depending on how you set it - and if you do editing color/brightness correction is much better with less noise. Obviously the catch-22 here is the fact you have to manually set the white balance and/or brightness every time you record something. When really what was needed some was manual controls to limit how far the camera could shift things. Honestly for most indoor shots the tungsten setting works good for white balance.I guess I'm asking a lot for a "cheap" camcorder, but really the hardware is where I expected it to be for the price. It's just a shame the software doesn't allow you to take better advantage of what you are working with. As far as battery and memory space. I bought a generic extra capacity battery (yeah it's fatter and adds a tad bit of weight) and a 64gb sd card. With those I can get 2 hours of video on the card (and have it setup to switch to internal for another hour) with the battery lasting about 2 hours - this is set at 1080p, mp4 @ 35mbps.

I've had this camera for a couple of weeks now and I am very impressed!.PROsVideo quality is as advertised. Full HD in 60p and it is very crisp..been capturing in MP4 and have been blown away by the quality.Lens is incredibly sharp...Canon glass doesn't disappoint.Onboard MIC holds its own and audio capture is very solid.Image Stabilization is excellent. I'm handholding pans and lifts that look professional even with such a small body.SD card location is well thought out and it is nice to have onboard memory in case you forget a card.Touch screen is easy to use and responsive.CONsLow light is better than most camcorders (even some professional models) but lacks the wow factor...that said, it's solid enough not to get dinged a star...maybe half a star.Auto focus is fooled often in low light, except in portrait mode. Face recognition feature is very good at identifying and focusing even in low light.Manual focus is a bit clunky.Zoom button could be improved. Zoom is good, but wish the orientations was forward/back not side-to-side...again, not something you dig the camera for.Menus aren't horrible but could be improved could be more intuitive.Battery is a little weak. Extended battery (as standard) would be nice.For the money, it's hard to find another camera that is going to rival the features and quality of this camera. Unless you're willing to fork over a $1,000...this is a camcorder to seriously consider.Overall 4½ stars, but I'm rounding up at how pleased I am with the results.

Great video and sound quality. Some wind noise in higher wind, but only when at certain angles to the wind. Battery life is as advertised, be sure to buy a second battery, my experience is you get about 2 hours on a full charge. 32MB storage is plenty, also have option to select that it transfers to supplemental storage (that you install) when the main storage is full. Biggest issue to me other than the battery life is the glare I get in the LCD display when doing video outdoors in bright settings. Relatively simple to connect to TV for viewing (I used supplied HDMI cable). Simple to use for a novice.

I produce a local television show and, since it is broadcast in standard definition, we've been shooting it with VIXIA cameras - specifically the HF M40. We decided to add an extra camera and naturally thought the HF R52 would be an upgrade to what we have been using. I liked that it offered manual focus and different options for picture quality. Well both of those features ended up causing us major problems. The manual focus simply doesn't work. In our first episode with this camera, the subject was totally out of focus (we couldn't tell while we were shooting because the monitor is so small). So on our second episode we took extra time to make sure the focus was set properly. Somehow it reset and once again our subject was out of focus. We figured the problem was operator error and decided to give it one more shot. We read the manual, looked online and asked around. Needless to say we had been setting the focus properly but it just kept resetting or not registering our settings in the first place. We shot our third (and final) episode with this camera and it was still terribly out of focus.Even if the focus had been fine the picture quality was terrible. Even for a standard definition television show the quality was unacceptable. We used the higher picture quality settings (which affected our frame rates) but it was still sub-par.I'm really disappointed in this camera, especially considering I have always been a huge fan of Canon products. I have since traded this in and hope to track down the discontinued M40. Even though its old and nearly obsolete, it is far superior to the R52.