This Toshiba arguably takes these palm-type camcorders as far as they can go. In fact, there probably won't be many innovations in the future because these gadgets have mostly been replaced by high-functioning smartphones. A big advantage of a smartphone is that you can instantly email your photos and videos to friends or post them to social media. That said, this is one of the best palmcorders on paper. It beats the more famous Flip by far. Then again, the Flip is the worst name-brand camcorder, in my opinion.
PROS
- Full 1080p HD video
- Uses SD cards. That's right, easily available full size SD cards, no MicroSD. Unlike the Flip, which has no removable memory, this allows you to easily continue recording without ever running out of room. With the Flip, you'll need to take you laptop on vacation to free the built-in memory.
- Uses a Backside Illuminated sensor which may improve low light abilities. for what it's worth, the new Samsung digital camera also uses a BSI sensor, but some critics say that low light abilities are still poor.
- Has 16X digital zoom which is the highest I've seen. Most palmcorders only have 2-6X digital zoom. Those who claim that digital zoom is no better than cropping, that;s not true. Go to Wikipedia to see why.
- Has HDMI output to display full 1080p on your HDTV
- Has Digital image stabilization which helps steady videos (but may add unwanted artifacts to the image)
- Has other goodies like face tracking which helps exposure, time lapse photography, motion detection (to act as a security or nature camera), etc.
- Can function as a webcam -- VERY RARE yet often requested feature!!! I'm not sure why so many people ask for this feature since virtually all laptop and netbooks have a webcam built in.
- Uses the MP4 container, which is much more universal than the Mac-specific MOV format
- Uses H264 compression, which offers the highest compression today. You can 4x as much video using H24 than MJPEG, which cheaper palmcorders use
- Has the highest resolution still mode I've ever seen on a camcorder 16mp, albeit interpolated. The Flip doesnt even have a still mode.
- The description claims that it has a flash but I'm skeptical. It may simply be a bright LED to offers a bit of illumination. Still, that's an improvement over other models which have no lighting at all.
- Can take 60fps videos for high speed objects
CONS
- The sensor is only 5mp so the 16mp stills are interpolated. In other words, it uses an algorithm to artificially put lines (dots) in based on surrounding lines. That makes the resolution higher than what was actually captured.
- Digital stabilization not optical. That adds noise and may cause it to skip frames in low light
- Digital zoom, not optical. The zoom is then also artificial, and you;re effectively making the image lower resolution. But to be honest, because these palmcorders are flat, it's very rare to have the protruding optical zoom. I've only seen it on a Sanyo.
- Webcam is only VGA (640x480) which is 10+ y/o technology. But still, very few camcorders can even function as a webcam.
- I'm not positive but the sound may be monaural, which is inexcusable for a 1080p video.
- A BIG PEEVE OF MINE: YOU CAN'T PAUSE WHILE RECORDING!!!! That means you'll end up with lots of small snippets of the same event which wastes space and time (to have to stitch them together) -- and annoying to play since you have to forward to the next snippet constantly. To be fair, virtually no camcorder under $200 can pause while recording -- except for Samsungs. Even their $60 digital cameras can pause while recording videos.
- Fixed focus lens and not auto-focus.
============
- According to the description, this doesn't have a touchscreen. Yet Toshiba's website says that the B10 has a touchscreen.
