Candid camcorders

Tuesday 06 October

It wasn’t too long ago that HD camcorders were as big as that VHS camcorder that Michael J Fox was sporting in Back to the Future and as costly as a five bedroom terraced house in Baker Street. In the latest episode of The Gadget Show I got to grips with three entry-level HD camcorders that won’t break your bank.

First up the Sanyo Xacti TH1. It costs around £180 and sports the kind of tech that camcorders of yesteryear could only dream about. It records at 720p (not full-1080p) so you can get around eight hours footage on a 32GB memory card. It has a 30x optical zoom, face chaser tech and a two-megapixel sensor for stills footage. So was it up to my standards?

The Toshiba Camileo S10 is next up and the cheapest of the trio at under a ton. It’s pistol grip styling is pretty swish, but can its film footage match up to its looks? Well, it records at 720 and 1080p, and like the TH1 it’ll give you about eight hours recording time. Elsewhere it had a five-megapixel camera with a 4x digital zoom. No optical here we’re afraid. But it does look very beautiful.

Finally I got to grips with the Flip Ultra HD. Around £150 gets you this tiny camcorder that captures in 720p and has 8GB of storage built in, which will hold a whopping 120 hours of footage! And of course it has that flip-out USB connection. Very handy indeed.

But which of these pocket camcorders took the best footage? Find out in the video above!