Disclaimer first -- I'm a complete newbie on the videocamera front.

That said, I just received my HV20 today and have been playing around a bit with it and am very disappointed with the indoors performance. My question -- is this the HV20, is it potentially a defect in MY HV20, or is that just the way all camcorders are indoors? Specifically, the degree of noisiness is extremely noticeable. I've taken a look at a fair number of samples that people have uploaded and haven't seen anything that looked as bad, but haven't come across many indoors shots. We've got an overcast day and it seems to do fine outside. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Kevin

What are your settings?

Take a look at these frame grabs... he also has videos posted.
http://www.vasher.com/v4/v4_pictures.php

Click "Canon HV20 images" to the right.

This thing will put out a fantastic image with just a little candle light (with the right settings).

PS- Play with your exposure settings and see if that helps. Sounds like it may be a tad high. Check your White Balance setting as well or set everything to automatic.

Thanks for the feedback. I started on auto and then tried playing around with a lot of different settings and it ranges from mediocre to bad. I don't have a firewire cable yet, so can't see what it looks like on the computer, but on the 50" plasma I'm not getting anything close to what I've seen on some of the sample vids I've seen posted.

Thanks for the feedback. I started on auto and then tried playing around with a lot of different settings and it ranges from mediocre to bad. I don't have a firewire cable yet, so can't see what it looks like on the computer, but on the 50" plasma I'm not getting anything close to what I've seen on some of the sample vids I've seen posted.

You really ought to try out the 24p mode, brightens indoor footage a great deal based on other's comments and my personal testing this evening. I was able to shoot some footage of my kids indoors tonight that I definitely could not have taken with my old Canon Elura camcorder. As for graininess, any camcorder without a ton of light is going to have this to some degree. It does seem that the HV20's is pretty fine grain compared to most though. I had footage at full resolution on a widescreen laptop that still looked very good considering, and obviously downsizing the video at all makes it look that much better in terms of the grain being less visible.

I believe someone recommended using these settings

1) Set program mode to Cinema Mode (not 24p)
2) Set to custom image settings and set it to sharpness -1, brightness -1 and contrast -1

And it greatly increased the low light quality