Canon Elura 2

The Canon Elura2 is a very small DV camcorder. I spent a lot of time researching the mini camcorders, and decided to buy this one. I didn't have a lot of technical detail to go on at the time, so the decision was half-information, half-guess.

Now that I've owned this thing for several months, I want to publish what I know and feel about it to aid others trying to make this same kind of decision. I'm not a film or photography expert, but I'm not a total novice, either. This is a preliminary publishing, so it doesn't have many of the images I want to include, yet.

Purchase
How We Use It
Pre-programmed Modes
Usability

Purchase

I decided to get the non-memory-card model. We have an iMac-DVD with iMovie and Firewire, so we didn't really feel the memory card added a lot of value, only a lot of complexity and $200 bucks...

We purchased online at Profeel for $1100, with additional value package of $250 for 5 year warrenty, extra battery, 5 tapes (Panasonic "consumer"-quality), padded case.

Great price, fast delivery, no problem.

How We Use It

This is a family camera. My wife uses it to document her horse training program. My kids use it to follow our pets around and catch their antics. I use it to capture the milling life of my job and family; vacations, holidays, and events.

With iMovie, it was very easy to put together a Quicktime movie of our family thanksgiving, my first project. You just plug the firewire into the camera port, put it in VCR mode, and then you can control everything from the computer. We made a little movie, and put the movie and a set of stills on our website, and invited the family to come look. While I am a computer engineer, I didn't have to be one to do this.

When importing the video, iMovie reads off the camera and separates each continuous video segment and places them seperately onto a "palatte". You can edit, chop, split, dice, overdub, fade, title, and otherwise maim these segments and then splice them into a nice little Quicktime movie in various sizes/resolutions, from tiny to 640x480 @ 30fps. (There is a Quicktime viewer available for Windows from Apple.)

iMovie also puts still photos onto the palatte with their six-second sound bite. You can save these as jpeg or pict files at 640x480. I haven't found them to be very sharp, but the color rendition is super. I seem to shoot a lot of very low-light stuff, which I think is a problem for stills in "auto" mode (1/30th sec exposure?). However, I shot some stills at a rock and mineral show in a flourecent-light hall, and they came out really great. I am playing around with controlling the shutter speeds and such; I think you need the highest speed possible to get the most sharpness, given that the resolution is fairly modest. I'll post an update on this...

A second project was shooting Theresa's horse training video, in which she and her horse perform distinct tasks in the Parelli Natural Horsemanship program. This involved following a moving horse around an arena in bright daylight, with a lot of zooming and panning. I tried hand-holding it and also used a tripod. The image stablization worked well, but the tripod was best for overall smoothness. Either way required great concentration on my part ;-).

The resulting movie was also easy to put together. My wife picked out which segments to include in the final cut (after endless deliberation), and how to string them together. Since you can "pan" through a segment with the mouse as fast as you like, the bottleneck of this process was human indecision, not computer speed. We used some of the titling and overdubbing here; pretty easy.

Pre-programmed Modes

The Elura comes with several pre-programmed modes which set up various parameters of exposure and shutter speed. (These are selectable from the click-wheel on the camera back; click to bring up menu, roll to highlight, click again to select.)
  • Easy Mode is the point-and-shoot mode. Nuff' said.
  • Auto Mode is like the "Easy Mode", but you can manually set exposure and focus.
  • Sports is for brightly-lit action shots. I assume that shutter speed is very high. Why doesn't the user manual tell me?
  • Portrait is for short-depth-of-field shots. Best used in medium-to-long telephoto. Softens forground and background focus.
  • Spotlight is for brightly lit subjects against relatively dark backgrounds.
  • Snow/sand is for bright backgrounds, in which the subject may be too dimly exposed.
  • Low Light where the iris of the camera is opened for more light-gathering. Maybe a slower shutter speed? The user manual is again silent on the issue...
    • I've discovered that the trick to getting good photos or video is to understand these modes and select the right one for the lighting conditions. "Auto" is right almost anytime, but like all auto-systems, there are conditions under which it needs your guidance. For example, in very low-light conditions, you must set "Low Light" mode; the camera just won't go there automatically. (I suspect that there's a 1/30 shutter-speed available in low-light mode that auto-mode won't select? Anyone know?) Likewise, in very bright light, you have to select "Sports" mode to bump the camera to it's other extreme.

    I've designed a matrix of photos (below) to illustrate each of the modes vs the conditions they are ostensibly designed to optimize.

    This section under construction!

    Sports Mode
    Auto
    		 Sport
    		 Portrait
    		 Spotlight
    		 Snow/Sand
    		 LowLight
    Portrait Mode
    Auto
    		 Sport
    		 Portrait
    		 Spotlight
    		 Snow/Sand
    		 LowLight
    Spotlight Mode
    Auto
    		 Sport
    		 Portrait
    		 Spotlight
    		 Snow/Sand
    		 LowLight
    Snow/Sand Mode
    Auto
    		 Sport
    		 Portrait
    		 Spotlight
    		 Snow/Sand
    		 LowLight
    Low-light Mode
    Auto
    		 Sport
    		 Portrait
    		 Spotlight
    		 Snow/Sand
    		 LowLight
    Hmmm...

    Usability

    We compare the experience of using the Elura against our long experience with a Sony Handycam Video 8, Canon Sure-shot, Canon Elph2, Olympus Epic Zoom, and an Olympus OM-2 Auto-SLR. The thing that comes through is that in size and ease of use, it's more like a snapshot camera than anything else. You can use it very much like the OM-2, for example, with manual/auto everything, but the auto-focus brings it into the realm of point and shoot. Likewise, you can take video without the actual physical fatique that big camcorders cause.

    Quality - the camera is metal bodied, solid, and conveys a very high-quality construction. Nothing loose or ill-fitted. When the little body clam-shells open to expel the tape, it's like seeing Borg technology at work! When you spend over a thousand dollars for something, it should feel like this. (The popular Elph2 shares this solid heft-and-feel.)

    Size - The Elura fits in any coat pocket (or my coveralls ;-), and a couple of the tiny batteries will fit anywhere. The hand can find a comfortable grip, but it takes a little practice; the thing's so small that you have to train yourself not to touch the lens.

    Batteries - Various sources complain of the short-life batteries, but when they're the size of matchbooks, I think it's actually better than lugging around electronic bullion. Forty-five minutes is a pretty long time, after all. The charger is easy to use, tells you via flashing lights what charge state the batteries are in, and they charge in no time. I don't like taking the batteries out between uses (they discharge in a couple of days, otherwise, go figure), but it seems to remind me to plop them in the charger.

    Lens and focus - the 27mm lens (!) has real filter threads. I bought a clear Hoya filter for it from the Camera People. When I read that the minimum focal length was 1 cm, I thought that was some sort of misprint! Not so. This thing takes really sharp, color-true closeup stills and video!

    The zoom works well, with a pressure-sensitive zoom button under the right index finger with which you can control the rate of zoom with a little practice. My right index finger unfortunately believes that pushing "up" on the button means "telephoto", whereas the camera has the opposite idea. This took quite a lot of getting used to filming the horse training. I'm still not fully acclimated.

    The auto-focus seems kind of slow, but faster than my ancient Sony HandyCam. There are some things it won't focus on, especially into telephoto. Fortunately, you just press the manual focus button on the back and roll the little wheel to focus. I feel like neither the eyepiece nor LCD screen have enough resolution to allow fine manual focus, but I'm not exactly a spring chicken, eye-wise...

    I wish this thing had a wide-angle lens or attachement. In a "people" situation, you're forced to be back away from the action to get more than one person in the frame. (I have since seen some wide-angle attachements pop up here and there - I'm going to get one and report...)

    Controls - I'm really impressed with the ergonomics in such a small contraption. The buttons/knobs/wheels are relatively easy to find and use. The remote control provides the full keyboard of functionality, including frame-by-frame forward and back, still photo search, and everything else. The remote is particularly convenient to use while editting video on the computer (for photo search), for controlling the camera on a tripod, or for controlling the camera during TV playback.

    One control drawback is the exposure and focus lock buttons on the back of the camera. I've accidently pressed them occassionally, but it's obvious that something is wrong and the viewfinder tells you clearly that a mode is locked. The problem isn't that the buttons are necessarily in the wrong place; there's just no other more likely space on this tiny camera to put the bloody things.

    Sound - very sensitive. I have to remember not to breath too heavily when filming, and I have to remind myself not to interject very loud comments. I actually hear stereo effects on playback. There's an electronic windnoise filter, which I leave on (since it really works). 16-bit sound is available, but I record in 12-bit stereo, which allows later over-dubbing during editting. Is the sound good relative to other cameras? Haven't a clue...

    Video - video can be played on a TV via the convenient interface cords. The picture quality is quite good. The color, particularly, seems to be very true-to-life; even my kids commented on it. Likewise, you can record video to VCR tape. The full-frame video mode ("progressive scan") makes jumpy video, but is convenient for still-frame out-takes and analyzing fast-motion activities.

    Interfaces - There is an additional "docking station" which contains S-video and external mic interfaces. Saving space on seldom-used features with this design was a good idea (since I've never used them ;-)

    Still photos - The six-second audio recorded with each still photo is a mysteriously powerful thing. Once you learn to think about it, and start to use it, the photos become more than just photos. You can flip the LCD over and let people see the picture you're taking. They invariably say something like, "Oh, God, just look at my hair!", or "You look like a dork!". You can get them to sing, or confess, or a hundred other amusing things. It's almost an entirely new medium!

    Summary

    Upside - I'm very enthusiastic about this very versatile camera! It's small enough to go anywhere, so it does. It interfaces with everything, so you never feel like you're trapped in a technological corner. It easily captures the cool and important things in life you want to remember and share, and makes it easy to share them.

    The iMac-DVD contributes a lot to the ease-of-use and versatility of the camera - they plug-and-play right out of the box. (I'm not a Mac fanatic, btw; I'm a Linux afficianado, myself.)

    Downside - it's so small! I think some people will find that it's just too small for their hands or temperment. Oh well...

    I hope all this was helpful. Take care...

    Back to Wayne's page.

    wallen@io.com

    Copyright 2001 Wayne Preston Allen.