Not impressed by the latest emotional concoction on offer from Bollywood? Well, it’s time to buy yourself a megaphone and light meter and catch the next train to Filmistan. That is if you first lay your hands on a Canon HF 11 HD camcorder, simply the sharpest smoothest handycam in town.

But to call the HF 11 a handycam would be like calling champagne a wine with fizz, for this is the first non-professional camcorder with a 24Mbps bitrate, the highest in AVCHD format. The camera, which weighs just 380 gm and easily comes within even a teenager’s grip, also has 32GB storage space — that’s about 12 hours of High definition video.

Though the camera is actually an improvement on the HF10 which was ruling the top spot till now, it also has Dual Flash Memory camcorder which allows users to record on the 32GB internal memory as well as the removable SDHC card ¿ you can decide the capacity of that one.

But as someone who’s tried out some other cameras before, the feature that appealed the most to me was the zoom. To use a cliché it’s like a hot knife on butter, and can easily be mastered by even the most unsteady hand. And the 12x HD video zoom lens means that I could focus on the fireworks in a banquet hall down the road as if it was next door. To make life easier, the optical image stabiliser negates much of the noise that you would associate with digital images.

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