Toshiba Camileo S20 Full HD 1080p Camcorder UK version - Black

Product Information

Video resolutions range from VGA up to the aforementioned Full HD. In between, there’s 720p and a curious 848 x 480 option called WVGA. This provides a 16:9 widescreen aspect but with the same vertical resolution as VGA. It also records at 60 frames/sec whilst the other modes use 30 frames/sec. Video is stored on flash memory, but the H30 includes just 128MB on board, of which only about 96MB is usable, so SDHC media is a necessity. At the top Full HD quality setting, a 4GB card will be enough for around one hour of video. Strangely, there’s also an Effect menu that doesn’t contain digital effects. This is where you toggle image stabilisation and a variety of special shooting modes. Like the Camileo S20, you can only use image stabilisation at resolutions below Full HD, presumably because – like the digital zoom – it uses the extra available pixels when not all the CMOS is being utilised. It’s not the most effective system, either. On the surface, this camera looks like a great deal. It has a pistol form factor and a relatively large, 3-inch flip-out touchscreen.

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With excellent image stabilisation built in, it isn't a victim of the shake associated with many models.Meanwhile in Timelapse mode, the camera takes a sequence of photographs at a pre-defined interval (0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds). Toshiba has provided some more fun-oriented facilities. There’s a motion sensing setting, which triggers recording when there’s action in the frame. The time lapse mode records a frame every 1, 3 or 5 seconds. There’s also a slow motion option which grabs video at four times the normal speed but at a lowly 320 x 240 resolution. Like the Gigashot, the Camileo Pro HD eschews the dominant AVCHD standard. But where the Gigashot opts for HDMV instead, the Camileo relies on MP4. It doesn’t offer Full HD, either, or even the 1,440 x 1,080 of HDV, but shoots at 1,280 x 720 at its highest setting. It also uses a rather aggressive level of compression to reach 4Mbits/sec, with no other compression modes available, although the video is progressively scanned. Alternatively, you can choose DVD (720 x 576), VGA (640 x 480) and CIF (352 x 240) resolutions. Whichever setting you select, the Camileo is limited to 30 frames/sec, which will be great for YouTube but not so good if you want to convert your footage to DVD for use in 25 fps Europe. Our biggest concern is that moving subjects and camera angles resulted in a skewed image. This is a side effect of the way CMOS sensors capture each frame one line at a time (unlike CCDs, which capture the whole image simultaneously). As a result, the bottom of the frame is captured a fraction of a second later than the top, distorting the shape of moving subjects. It’s a problem that was slightly visible on all the HD cameras except Samsung’s VP-HMX20C, but here it was particularly bad.

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Although we’ve not been hugely impressed by the image quality afforded by previous Toshiba Camileos, the X400 provides surprisingly decent performance. In good lighting, colours are bright and faithful, with a relatively sharp picture. Low light performance is a little less exciting. Although the X400 does maintain a reasonable level of brightness, but the white balance isn’t very accurate and there’s a noticable loss in detail. The top three icons let you toggle image stabilisation, change the recording format, and turn on the LED video light or Digital Light modes. The latter essentially ramps up the video gain, so you can see more detail and a brighter image in poor illumination. Along the bottom, the full menu provides access to these features again, but also some fun additional options. The B10 does have a few more features than many of its competitors, though. The 16x telephoto seems impressive at first glance, but it’s still digital so noticeably pixellates the image when you zoom in. There’s a discrete button on the side which turns on the LED video light and toggles between this and what Toshiba calls “digital light” mode. This is essentially a single-setting video gain option, which does boost brightness, but at the expense of washing out the colour and introducing a grainy quality to the image due to sensor noise. The LED video light is no better than smartphone LED video lights, too, so only effective at very close range. We found it petered out rapidly beyond a metre range, but could still come in handy for shooting nearby objects in the dark.For editing, a regular USB 2.0 connection is provided to drag clips onto your PC. Since the Camileo records its MPEG-4 H.264 video in MP4 format, however, rather than AVCHD, the footage is not as widely supported in editing applications. CyberLink’s PowerDirector 7 had no trouble coping with it, but neither Pinnacle’s Studio Plus 11.1.2 nor Ulead VideoStudio 11.5 could import the files. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 thought the MP4 files only contained audio. Toshiba includes Nero 8 Essentials, however, which can at least burn footage to disc. Video is recorded in H.264 format at 1,440×1,080 pixels per frame, but non-square pixels give it the same widescreen aspect ratio as the other HD cameras. This lower resolution wasn’t a huge loss, though, and in bright light we were impressed by the amount of detail the H20 captured. It fell short of the best HD cameras but showed significant improvements over the SD models and even outperformed Panasonic’s HDC-SD20 and Sony’s HDR-TG3E at times. Colours weren’t great, though, with overblown contrast sometimes obliterating highlights and shadows. Indoors, video was grainy, and in very low light the camera failed to record anything at all. There’s a big market for action cameras that let us record the rough and tumble of our sporting achievements, and one name that’s currently synonymous with them is GoPro. Hoping to dent GoPro’s market share, however, is Toshiba with its much cheaper Camileo X-Sports.