Customer Rating: 



Summary: Increible picture quality
Comment: This is my first refurbished product, the camera looks like new, come with all their accesories, works perfect, I own a
Sony HVR-HD1000u and the hv20 blow away the
Sony, low light is a lot better in the canon and 24p option is a plus for me.
The construction is a little bit crappy but the picture quality is stunning.
Best Regards.
Customer Rating: 



Summary: Fantastic Image Quality, But 24P Is Tough To Post-Process
Comment: I used to own a Canon GL2 (prosumer SD 3CCD camera with Canon L lens) but got tired of carrying it around to take travel video which I rarely ended up editing. So I sold it and purchased this, looking forward to HD quality and 24P framerates.
The HD quality does not disappoint in any way whatsoever. Hook this up to a 1080i/p via HDMI and the quality of the image will be indistinguishable from what you see on any of the HD channels. I was blown away.
Build quality wise, it seems a little cheap, the tape loading door on my has a little play in it. It's extremely light, which makes it hard to hold steady; however, the optical image stabilization is surprisingly good. Attempting to hold the camera steady at full zoom results in nearly shake free video.
The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars (and it may not matter to you) is that recording in 24p mode, doesn't actually record 24 progressive frames per second. Instead it records 18 progressive frames and 12 interlaced ones in succession, inside of a 60i stream. There are also no markers embedded in the video to signal to applications e.g. Adobe Premiere,
Sony Vegas, etc. the correct way to process the stream. In order to get a real 24p video you need to perform a pulldown. There are various ways to do this, but none of them are trivial (search the Internet for "Canon HV20 24p Pulldown").
All in all, though, this is an amazing little device. The video I recently took of Upper Yosemite Falls looks better on my TV than I remember it. How often does that happen to you?!