Camcorders forum: Canon vixia HF20 or Canon Vixia HF200?

My logic was: The less built-in to the device, the better (less to break). Plus, the price difference seemed to be about the cost of the built-in memory, and since the cost of SD memory cards is constantly dropping, it felt like the money I'd save could buy a bigger amount of memory down the road.

I just got the HF200 in the mail, and it's gorgeous. We're going into production on a web series in a couple weeks, where it'll really be put through it's paces. I purchased a 16GB SD card, and just ordered another 16GB card with a USB reader so that we can film with one card while the other is downloading footage to a drive.

Hope that helps!
~Trav

Hi,
I am a novice at this, but let me share what I have found out so far.
I took my 4 gig SD card into Best Buy, recorded several min of video on the Canon Vixia HF20, connected that card to a card reader, plugged into my PS3 via USB. The card was recognized and read. The video played back via PS3/HDMI to my Sony 46" LCD and was absolutely stunning! I played it over and over to see every detail. Looked so much better than broadcast quality.
I used same USB connection to my computer, running Vista Ultimate with 4 gig DDR. Had to download some codecs, but the video was also excellent in Windows Player.
From my "extensive" research I have found there is no difference in video quality with the 20 vs 200. The only diff is the built in flash drive. There are no moving parts with a flash drive, so I would'nt be concerned about something breaking. You just have to decide whether to buy SD cards; which as was mentioned, are getting very inexpensive. My thought is to save the money and buy the 200.(I bought an 8 gig 4 rating card for $14..last Aug through Amazon. That is about 2 hrs of HD recording)
One word of caution though. Make sure the SD card is rated 4 or above. The number will be on the front of the card. If you don't see a 4, 6, or 10; then it will not record HD. SD will be okay.
Hope this helps some.

Hi! I am a novice user and roaming from forum to forum to learn a way about how to play my files shoot in the Canon Vixia HF 200 in my regular Toshiba Tecra Intel Centrino Duo Processor and 2 GB RAM. Can you suggest what kind of Codec players may I need to run smoothly my shoot files?

id say if the difference is less then $100 get the hf20. a 32gb sdhc is gonna be around that much