Great Compact Camera

I purchased the Canon ZR for my wife, I could not believe how much the price had dropped, or how well made the camera was once we received it. When you are using it or just carrying it around people think you have a cheap 35MM camera... The best thing is you can just put it on your neck running and it will record as you walk with the image stabilization it works fine.

The battery life is short and extra batteries can be expensive about $80.00 locally about $ 60.00 online so shop carefully.
Canon ships the system complete a remote control, and cables, to attach the camera to your TV(S-video and RCA) so that you can view pictures or movies the pictures take about 15 sec of time so if you take a series of pictures they become a slide show when you play them back. Audio is also recorded when you take a still so you can say what the picture is. While the camera records in stereo the microphone sit side by side so it will not sound like stereo.

The included docking base whish is about an inch thick and very light, has the ability to attach external microphones.
The camera comes with a built in lens cover which is very handy, unfortunately there is no way to attach any accessories such as filters.

The MiniDV tapes are incredibly small and record about 50 min of video. Since the batteries last less than that it is very important that you have your spare batteries as the best action always seems to come at the end.

While the camera is small, the included vuefinder for bright conditions when the LCD panel is hard to read is bulky along with the base cables battery charger spare tapes and batteries we have a case that is about 8.5x8.5x8.5" that holds everything while the camera itself is about 3x5x2.

The controls while complicated to use all the feature are really quite simple for day to day use there is one slider for record or playback another for video or still photography along with a start/stop button and the zoom the camera like most is made for right handed people with only the zoom button and the lens cover slider on the left side of the camera.

Overall this is a great camera to travel with and for anyone to use with the 11x zoom you can frame the picture the way you want, the digital zoom goes to 44x but gets grainy pretty quickly. If you are going to use your Computer for editing better to zoom there. The LCD screen even flips 180 degree so the you can film your self.

The MINi DV tapes can be had for about $ 10.00 each online.

The 1394 AKA Firewire port is another big plus on the camera the newer Macs come with the port PCs for the most part don't but either way you need software to do actual editing and for the PC you can get the board with software for less than $ 100.00 and the software for the Mac will cost you that much. Just be sure you have lots of hard disk space as video takes up megabytes of disk space.