Home > Consumer Reviews > Canon ZR60 MiniDV Digital Camcorder with 2.5" LCD, 18x Optical Zoom and Image Stabilization

I've owned this camcorder for several years with zero problems. Excellent for amateurs; easy to use with few drawbacks. Compact, light and user friendly for the most part. Canon always delivers for me.

I bought this unit about 5 years ago and used it quite extensively, but then for 3 years it sat in a drawer unused. Now, planning a trip,I resurrected it, but found that I couldn't see images through the view finder. I took it to Best Buy, and they thought that the shutter was defective. I then went to Circuit City and they recommeded trying a head cleaner. I ran the head cleaner, and it started to work at first
but then the same thing happened again - no viewer image. I'm not sure what to do, maybe send it to Canon and see what they say.

Overall, the camera houses some nice manual features, and an external mic in, and is very user friendly. However, you get what you pay for. The color defintion is not there; anything less than full sun and the colors drain out of the picture. Low light performance leads the camera to crank up the gain and produce a noisy image that I would call un presentable, but still fine for the price range. The camera always seems to be two steps away from a black and white image, so plan to do some color correction to fix the image. I agree with everyone else on the external mic; the tape transport is noisy. In the end, however, I love the camera. It's low quality, cheap, but has tons of features and a shoe and mic input to add a shotgun to the top. I know of many cameras that cost much much more than this one that do not even provide a headphone jack seperate from the microphone input. I realy love the camera, and you will too, as long as you can compromise on the image quality in lower light and the audio issue.

Just over a year after purchase, the LCD screen went black. I did some research online and heard about the CCD malfunctioning in a bunch of canon series camcorders, including the ZR60. The camera tech I took it to was going to charge me $300 to fix it, but luckily Canon did it for free! because of this happening to so many cameras! So, since I got it fixed it still works great! I wouldn't use it for anything professional, but its small enough to carry around for a good time and film home movies!

Great value for the money (at the time, and now). Very high quality images in good lighting, especially outdoors; average to lower quality in low lighting (but hard to blame this on Canon; my old Sony was worse). No motor noise or any other problems. No problems with buttons, functions, etc. Just thinking about a new one now since the 2.2M pixel CCDs are the norm now, and this one has less.