Evaluation: 
Conclusion: This is a great flash camcorder that works with Ubuntu Hardy Heron!
Review: This camcorder has been great! I was debating between this one and the Panasonic SDR-S7 and Samsung MX10. Those camcorders had around 680k pixels whereas this one comes in around 710k pixels. What does that mean? Better videos. The 48x advance zoom is awesome and if you want only the optical at 37x, that is great too. You can't tell the 48x is doing some digital tricks. The quality looks just as good as just optical. The other camcorders can be found online for around $200 but with this one coming in at just over $300, you will be far happier with this one.
When I was looking for this, I wanted to get a camcorder who's file format would play on Ubuntu without any conversion and also plays on Windows Media Center Vista. This camera does both! To copy the videos, I remove the flash card from my camera and insert it into the flash reader on my laptop. The only "conversion" I have to do to get the videos to play is to change the ".MOD" ending to ".MPG". This also makes the videos play fine on my WMC box. I then copy them to my WMC box over the network.
I use to have a Sony Digital 8 camcorder that I connected to my computer via a firewire cable. The videos the FS100 takes are just barely better than those. However, to get the videos on my computer is way faster copying them from a flash drive. I never want to use my Digital 8 camcorder again. The videos I have taken with this easily upload to YouTube. My FS100 videos show up there with the "watch in high quality" option below them. They really look good on YouTube when you click that link... better than most other videos out there. The quality of videos is phenomenal outside at sporting events and is just okay inside with low light conditions.
The videos I have so far record around 0.7 to 1.0 MB per second. That is why the 4 gig card gives will give you around 120 minutes of recording time. I have a "class 4" card and I haven't had any problems with it not being fast enough. I'd recommend at least a 4 gig card. If you can afford an 8 or 16 gig card, it would just give you more recording time before you have to copy them to your computer.
When the files are copied directly off the card on to my Ubuntu desktop, they play in Movie Player in wide screen format like they are suppose to. However, after I copy them to my Windows Media Center PC, they play in 4:3 mode. I have to adjust the "Zoom" setting to "3", I think, and they look normal. This isn't much of a downfall. I've heard there is a "sdcopy.exe" file that will copy the files and correct the header information for WMC so they will play in widescreen format by default.
I ended up going with the gray version because companies now seem to be charging more for the colored ones. It doesn't matter much because other than the color, they are all the same.
The FS100 really is about the size of a can of soda, except with a large screen sticking out of it. Some people criticize the lack of a view finder but why would you want anything like this attached to your face.
It starts up from a cold start in about 6 seconds. If you close the screen it goes into a low power mode which conserves the battery life.
The menu options on this are pretty simple and the "easy" button makes things, well.. easy.
If you are thinking about getting one of these... do it. The only type of camcorder that could create a better picture would be an HD one.
PROS:
Great Quality Videos - 710k pixels!
MPEG 4 video format and AAC audio
Videos Compatible with Ubuntu Hardy Heron with extension change
Videos Compatible with Windows Media Center with extension change
37x Optical, 48x Advance Zoom (check YouTube for examples)
Simple Menu
CONS:
Picture quality is kind of low... keep your digital camera for those.
Evaluation: 
Conclusion: Guy Serle's MyMac.com review
Review: I've been avoiding buying a new camcorder to replace the 8 year old DVC tape unit for awhile now. There were plenty of tempting offerings, but none matched the feature set and price point that I was looking for until I happened upon Canon's FS100 model at an Apple Store. While giving it a once over there, I liked the light weight, the responsive and variable zoom, the microphone input, and that at $399, it was still very much reasonable in price. I almost bought it right there at the Apple Store, but resolved to sleep on it first and check out what other people were saying about it. I'm glad I did, and afterwards I almost gave it a miss but decided that no other camcorder available currently in the this price range would meet my needs.
Let me say what I liked about it first. As said before, It's lightweight and small enough to fit in most pants pockets (or are you just happy to see me?) without making you walk funny. The unit measures 2.3-inches wide, 2.4-inches high, and 4.9-inches deep. It weighs about 9.2 ounces. It starts up almost instantly and is ready to record within a few seconds. It has a large 2.7-inch LCD display that is clear. It has a relatively easy menu system for setting up some of the various built-in features all of which a clearly displayed on the LCD. It has a variable zoom that can be as fast or as slow as the user might wish and there are some settings in the menu that allow you to adjust this even more. The battery lasted almost 2 hours of near continuous use for me (your usage will vary dependent on a number of factors). In it's highest video resolution mode, you can get nearly 2 hours of video from an 8GB SDHC memory card, though Canon states that you can get over 5 hours of video from the same card at a lower resolution. Keep in mind that while this camcorder does record in either 4:3 or 16:9, it isn't true high definition and if that's something you must have in a camcorder, keep on looking.
There are a number of effects available from the FS100's menus, like fade-in/fade-out, Sepia, and Black and white recording modes, Mosaic, and a few others of varying effectiveness. Most of these probably sound like nice additions, but I doubt you'll use them more than once. There are a number of Automatic Exposure settings as well (AE in the menu) including TV, Portrait, Sports, Night, Snow, Fireworks, etc. Chances are unless you have specific needs, the Auto setting will work just fine in most conditions. You can manually set the White Balance as well as the unit having Auto, Daylight, and Tungsten presets.
Canon does not supply any memory for this camera (though essentially the same camera models FS10 and FS11 has 8GB and 16GB built-in respectively for a higher price), so an SD (preferable an SDHC card) will be required. I put in an 8GB SDHC card from Transcend that cost roughly about $31 and if even more storage is needed the camcorder accepts 16GB cards as well.
One of the main reasons I bought this camcorder was that it had a microphone input. The input uses an industry standard 3.5mm jack (there are adapters available for other sized inputs from places like Radio Shack) and as long as Phantom power is not required, the FS100 should be able to use nearly any non-XLR microphone. The built-in microphone is very sensitive and does a pretty good job, but is subject to some wind noise as most built-in microphones are.
Now some of the things I don't like about this camcorder. The image sensor is only a little more than 1 megapixel. Still images look a little washed out and with both video and still images. The FS100 also does not do so well in low-light situations. I've used it now under some different lighting conditions and have had varied results. Fireworks seemed OK. The FS100 quickly adjusted itself from almost total darkness to bright bursts withe little effort. Also the FS100 had little trouble with typical stadium lighting, but any constant low-light situation was not that great.
The FS100 does take still pictures as well as video and it can shoot up to 5 frames a second. The image sensor as I said is only 1 megapixel so this is more like a stop-gap convergence answer for digital photography than a dedicated point and shoot. If your main focus is taking pictures and you want them to scale well in various sizes, the FS100 is not the answer for you.
The included software seemed next to useless to me or most likely any other Mac user that already has iPhoto for digital images. Once you have the camera plugged into a USB port and it mounts on your desktop, iPhoto should (depending on your settings) automatically start up. Downloading your still images using iPhoto is pretty straight forward like most digital cameras.
OK, let's talk about what this kind of stuff this unit is really meant for: video. Honestly, even with the complaining I've done (and I'm not through yet), I liked the video this camera put out. While low-light certainly isn't a strong point, it does pretty well in every other situation and I liked what I saw. Here's what I didn't like though, .MOD files. Know what those are? Apparently they're some kind of modified mpeg-2 format that Canon uses. iMovie 06 and QuickTime 7 had no idea what to do with these files and it took a little research to find a solution.
A company called Squared5 makes a software converter called MPEG Steamclip that is an absolute free download and that will take those .MOD files and make them QuickTime compatible files (in a variety of formats). Also iMovie 08 will import them as well.
One other minor complaint is that if you want to download the content off the camera, you'll either need to remove the card and put it in a reader or connect the camera via USB. No big deal in itself, but if you connect the camera directly, you MUST have the power cable connected and supplying power as well. If you're out and about, that may not be easy. You might be better of having a few other memory cards to use until you offload them later. Also no battery charger is included so the only way to charge the batter right out of the box is to have it inside the camera and connected to power.
I really like this camera even with all the complaining I've done and it will be my main family shooter for at least a few years. I can live with its shortcomings as it is light, easy to use, takes great non-HD video and it has an external microphone connection.
MyMac rating:3 out of 5
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Video quality is very very poor...
Review: I bought this to replace my aging MiniDV ZR200, and thought that stepping up to the newest format would be a good step since I copy the videos to my computer and then burn them to DVD. I loved the MiniDV format, but thought that this would be a good move since I could hear the tape motor in the background on my old camera, and with flash there are no moving parts. Bad idea... I got it in hand, charged the battery for 12 hours and then fired it up and the image quality was terrible. I have a cheap Canon SD1000 digital camera (Which I absolutely love) that can take short movies, and it blows away the videos I got from the FS100. Also the five year old ZR200 can record short videos to it's flash card, and that video is again far far better than anything I got with this FS100. At first everything was good, I could see the wall, floor, etc. But then my son walked in and asked me what it was, and as he talked and moved around the image ghosted so bad you could not recognize him at all until he stopped moving. I had bought a brand new class 6 SanDisk SD card for it, so it is the best flash card money can buy right now so that's not the issue. Bright light, dim light, different flash cards from other cameras etc. etc. and still no change. After playing with it for two hours and reading the entire English section of the manual I boxed it back up and shipped it back to Amazon and bought the ZR950 MiniDV camcorder instead. It's image quality is incomparable to the trash I got from the FS100, and it is $100 less to boot. The one thing that amazed me the most was walking into my kitchen and simply panning side to side about once a second for a bit. As the image moved the camera dropped to maybe 5 frames a second at best, and then came back up to a more acceptable frame rate once it stopped, while blurring out everything in the frame as it moved. Maybe in a few more years they will have the flash format to the point where it can be useful, but it is not there yet. If you want video quality that is on par with a cell phone or cheap web cam, this is your camera. If you want a camera to record birthdays and vacations to watch on TV later you will be disappointed.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Great for family use
Review: This camera seems to work fine for taking home video. It is lightweight and compact. I took it out of the box and had no problems with using it right away...it is extremely user friendly. I have previously owned a Canon video camera and loved it so this camera was an obvious choice. My previous camera is almost 10 years old and still works wonderfully which speaks to the quality of Canon products. My movies look amazing and the stillness of the movie even with high zoom is perfect. No motion sickness from shaky video. The battery life has been long lasting and transferring the clips from a built in SD reader in my laptop was a piece-of-cake...rapid transfer and plays on Windows easily. I haven't tried the SD converter for MPEG as another reviewer recommended, nor have I tried the software but I am completely happy with this purchase! They are very nice looking cameras too! I love the wine version-being somewhat influenced by the "cuteness" of it.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Perfect
Review: Awsome camera. Unbelieveable zoom, incredibly quiet operation that picked up a violin player at an outdoor wedding who was 200+ feet away, making great background music for every scene. Use a tripod, then walk away from it as it records, and nobody is spooked at somebody taking pictures.
Windows Vista's Media Player, Movie Maker, and DVD Maker all handle these .mod files perfectly. (Had to upgrade to Vista Ultimate since you can't upgrade from XP Pro version directly to Vista Home Premium)
The Windows Vista DVD maker was a big suprise - it creates menus that are moving video automatically - very professional looking DVD's compared to what I was expecting. Thank goodness I didn't buy an AVCHD camera - with all the editing problems of handling that format which spills part of the existing frame into the next one, so that you need diesel computer power to put the spilled video back into it's frame.
Direct USB Transfer of files to PC from the camera went fast but didn't transfer 20% of the files! All the while the LCD on the camera said "Don't turn off, don't disconnect the USB cable, while attached to the PC" What the Canon FS-100 LCD meant to say was "dismount from the PC before you disconnect" (using that icon in your system tray that leads to the message on the PC that it's "safe to disconect". Had to use a $20 SD Card reader on a USB wire to get the missing files into the computer. The camera was probably faster than my 6 year old Pentium 4, so my PC choked on the data causing the missing files - maybe. Still the SD Card reader works, while the USB transfer seems to go fine but misses some files.
The camera seems to create unnecessarily complex file numbers - uses Hex for example, then occasionally adds an extra A or B to an existing file name. Seems odd.
Attached to the composite video ports on the side of my Philips tube HDTV, I was suprised at the quality of the video - seemed like HDTV - filled the screen. Previously I thought composite video was supposed to be junk. Nope. And, once started it didn't need any button pushing to continue to the next file, although the remote would control the action.
Caution: read Wikipedia on the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R. Older players will only do DVD-R but they skip. DVD+R is preferred because it doesn't skip, slide, halt, freeze - except that players older than 2002-2004 will not play DVD+R.
Best Buy store last week had all three colors - wine, blue and silver at full list price $399 plus tax. Nope. Go Amazon - mine arrived in perfect condition. Awsome, just awsome. I love it.
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