End search issue
 

Finally I made my mind and bought a Canon HV10. My first impressions are excellent: the video picture quality is simply fantastic and even the photos are much better than the ones of my previous Panasonic GS250 with 3CCD, which were 3 Mpixel (same as HV10) but their real resolution was visibly inferior and their aspect was more “video-ish”.

I also appreciate the effective optical stabilizer and some manual controls, like the exposure adjustment, the manual focus assistance and the possibility to set focus to infinite.

However, I found a possible issue in the “End search” feature: when I insert a cassette (partially recorded) and push the “End search” button, nothing happens and the displayed text becomes red. On the other hand, after recording some new footage, if I go back to the Play mode, the “End search” is correctly performed. Worthless to say that this function would be useful BEFORE recording any video, that is just when it doesn’t work.

As a workaround now I record a few seconds of black tape before extracting the cassette, so it is easier to position manually the tape in the black portion before starting a new session.

Maybe am I doing anything wrong or missing any point, or is this a failure of the camcorder ? Has anyone else experienced this ?

Thank you for any advice.

Marco Durando

Marco, the issue is that when a tape is removed an reinserted, 'end search' no longer works for the footage already on the tape (that's in the manual). I believe this is true for most cams that have this feature. I agree though, it would be nice for it to work regardless.

This is same for Sony end search. Apparently camera has some method of storing location of last shot. It even works after shutting down and restarting camera, as long as tape is not removed.

My Panasonic GS120 appears to actually physically search the tape for the end.

Thank you, I hadn't noticed that on the manual.
I'm happy to learn that my camcorder works as expected, but I think the usefulness of this function is much reduced this way; in fact, my previous Panasonic GS250 did a physical search on the tape.
Anyway, I can live with it.
Thank you again.

I agree, I really don't understand why it is that way. A search algorithm to keep going until it finds blank tape shouldn't be hard, the only concern might be head wear. If you manually tell it to fast forward in the fastest FF speed (no picture shown), the camera still tells me a time code until the tape is blank, but a camcorder could do better by stopping precisely at the end without manual intervention.

If you're trying to find the boundary between recorded and never recorded portions of a tape it's pretty easy to do so using fast forward and rewind.

However if you're taping over an already recorded tape then it's much harder to know where you've left off when you last recorded something. That's what the End Search function is used for.