Canon Legria HF S21

Colour (8.05)

Canon definitely tweaked the colour rendering on its new crop of camcorders for 2010. Unfortunately, Canon's fiddling didn't translate into a more accurate colour performance for the HF S21. The camcorder produced a colour error of 4.35, which is a bit worse than last year's HF S100. Its saturation level, however, was a decent 84.72%. (More on how we test colour.)
 

Colour Accuracy Performance
Colour Test Chart (above), Colour Error Map (right)
The Canon HF S21 produced a colour error of 4.35 and a saturation level of 84.72% in our bright light colour testing. (The map on the right is a diagram of the colour error. The length and direction of each line indicates how the camcorder processed each particular colour.)

The Canon HF S21 has a number of colour modes, examples of which are shown below. In addition to these preset modes, there is also a customisable setting that allows you to make adjustments to colour depth, brightness, contrast, and sharpness. When you do customize these settings, however, you don't have much of a range to work with—each setting can only be set to -1, 0, or +1.
 

Canon HF S21 Colour Modes
Auto	100% Crop
Vivid	100% Crop
Neutral	100% Crop
Low Sharpening	100% Crop
Soft Skin Detail	100% Crop

The Canon HF S21 definitely has similar colours to last year's Canon HF S100, but we noticed some slight differences in certain red and blue tones. We were surprised that the HF S21 had worse colour accuracy than the HF S100 in our testing, but it is not like the colour results on the HF S21 are terrible. Interestingly, the HF S21 produced its most accurate colours when we used its vivid colour setting.
 

Canon HF S21 Colour Comparisons
Canon HF S21	Panasonic HDC-TM700
JVC GZ-HM1	Canon HF S100

The table below has close-up colour comparisons taken from the test images shown above. All of these models are high-end HD camcorders, so each of them has top-notch video performance in bright light.
 

	Close-Up Colour Comparisons
	Ideal	Canon HF S21	Panasonic HDC-TM700	JVC GZ-HM1	Canon HF S100
Red
	Ideal	Canon HF S21	Panasonic HDC-TM700	JVC GZ-HM1	Canon HF S100
Green
	Ideal	Canon HF S21	Panasonic HDC-TM700	JVC GZ-HM1	Canon HF S100
Blue
	Ideal	Canon HF S21	Panasonic HDC-TM700	JVC GZ-HM1	Canon HF S100
Skin Tone 1
	Ideal	Canon HF S21	Panasonic HDC-TM700	JVC GZ-HM1	Canon HF S100
Skin Tone 2

Of the camcorders in this set, the Panasonic HDC-TM700 had the best colour accuracy. The HF S21 wasn't a stellar performer in this test, but remember that Canon does allow for customizable colour control. So, if you don't like the colours in auto mode on the HF S21, you can always tweak the settings yourself.
 

Colour Score Comparison		Compare the Canon HF S21 to the Panasonic HDC-TM700
		Compare the Canon HF S21 to the JVC GZ-HM1
		Compare the Canon HF S21 to the Canon HF S100

Noise (7.28)

As with colour accuracy, the Canon HF S21 was again a so-so performer when it came to our noise test. The camcorder measured 0.8% noise, which is a halfway decent score, but doesn't represent an improvement over last year's models. Both the Panasonic HDC-TM700 and JVC GZ-HM1 had better noise scores in this test. (More on how we test noise.)
 

Noise Comparisons
Canon HF S21 100% Crop	Panasonic HDC-TM700 100% Crop	JVC GZ-HM1 100% Crop	Canon HF S100 100% Crop

The four camcorders shown above are all high-end HD models, so it isn't a surprise that they can each capture an incredibly sharp image in bright light. This is definitely an area where Canon improved slightly over last year, but Panasonic and JVC also improved their flagship camcorders and they capture even sharper images. The next section of our review—Motion and Sharpness—goes into this in more detail.
 

Noise Score Comparison		Compare the Canon HF S21 to the Panasonic HDC-TM700
		Compare the Canon HF S21 to the JVC GZ-HM1
		Compare the Canon HF S21 to the Canon HF S100