Toshiba Camileo S10 review
by Gwenster on Mar.28, 2009, under Visual Media
Wanting to create some great footage during citytrips or just whenever the hell I feel like it in
general I decided to step onto the mini camcorder stage with the Camileo S10 by Toshiba,
which on paperlooks to have the best specifications out of the commonly available ones
in Europe and sadly; we don’t have as much choice as Americans seem to have with
the distinctive lack of any Flip models.
To sum up the specifications of the Camileo S10 it sports up to a 1080P resolution,
image stabilser, 4x optical zoom, the ability to mount SD(HC) cards increasing it’s built
in 128MB storage to 32GB (!) a 2.5 inch rotating view screen, direct HDMI output and
a searchlight for dark conditions.
Supplied with the camera were several accessories including a handy travel case that
snaps onto your belt, a mini tripod, wiping cloth for the lens, a traditional AV cable ,
USB2 cable and last but not least a HDMI cable. The supplied software is by ARCsoft
and well . . I will get to that later.
Read more after the jump.
Turning the unit on is a simple feat, simply unfold the LCD screen and it powers
on automatically. The large record button lights up blue when it’s ready to shoot
and it turns orange when your recording, giving off a clear indicator of what it is
and isn’t doing at all times. It inmeadetely became apparant however, that the
Camileo could not actually do 1080P as advertised.
The resolution on it’s 1080P is 1440×768 .. which isn’t what your expecting if you
see 1080P mentioned. The image stabilser function only works up till 720P and
that’s exactly what I shot my test footage at. Various options include
whitebalance (scenes of daylight,night etc.) the EV levels can be adjusted
between +1 and -1 for the finetune fanatics, however the camera does not seem
to remember any other additional setting (aside from resolution choice)
after turning it off to conserve battery and on again at a later stage.
You will be required to input all your custom settings again after a power cycle
(EV,Scene, Image stabilser) With my 8GB card borrowed out I only had a 2GB
SDHC card available and on 720P that would result into 33 minutes of footage.
So how does it perform ?
In daylight situations the Camileo has an acceptable performance and the image
stabilser manages to do a good job correcting for “footstep” motions which can
be noticed clearly if you turn it off. However it doesn’t have your back when
you’ve zoomed in 4x times since the image at the “long” end of the zoom
becomes *very* shaky and unstable. When you shoot in low light conditions
the whole thing turns into a grainy mess as you can see in my test video below.
The built in searchlight does nothing to compensate because the searchlight
is not bright enough to be usable by the camera’s optics unless your about
40 cm away from an object tops. Using the Camileo at night is even more
horrible because every lightsource produces an awfull flare across your footage
The Camileo can also take still shots and at a pretty good quality too.
Whilst incurring more noise than a dedicated digital camera it’s still not too
bad and certainly lightyears ahead of any cameraphone you might be packing
with you, below are two samples.
Supplied with the Camera is the Arcsoft video editing software.
Windows movie maker, supplied with Windows XP and above operating
systems does a better job. However Windows movie maker doesn’t read
the .MOV files that the Camileo shoots and Arcsoft does. Arcsoft allows you
to edit on a basic level, cut, trim etc. some basic transition effects and that’s it.
It would surely have been enough for my test movie wouldn’t it be for the
fact that Arcsoft cannot encode at a higher resolution than 740x something
on the Quicktime codec and even *LESS* on the other codecs it can encode
to (WMV,MPEG1) It is completely unacceptable to supply software that
cannot even encode at the resolution everybody would buy the Camileo S10 for.
To conclude this review my thoughts are that the Camileo S10 is
better left alone. The specifications on paper looked good, but in reality
the performance was sub-par. Panning would have to be done incredibly
carefully to avoid blur and noise, whilst using the 4x zoom induces an
incredible amount of camera shake despite the image stabiliser.
The selling point of 1080P recording is also bogus seeing as it doesn’t
shoot at the actual full 1008P res. Any sort of indoor shooting results in
horrible footage and the camera isn’t at all usable at night even in a lit up
shopping street due to the flaring effects any lightsource would cause.
I will be bringing back my Camileo S10 and probably stick to my Ixus IS80
for now seeing as the “Flip” camcorders are not available in Holland and
probably never will be unless I import them.
(be sure to click on “HD” when viewing the sample video)
19 Comments for this entry
Leave a Reply
-
Howdy. Welcome to Lithiumstate!
Thanks for dropping by! Feel free to join the discussion by leaving comments, and stay updated by subscribing to the RSS feed. See ya around!
My tweets- 07:45 and already at the office; good thing about being early is; playing loud heavy metal music !
- WTF MAN ! *_* RT @news_blogg: Dead man found in landing gear of a Delta Flight in Tokyo http://bit.ly/bYeT2V live news blogg
- Boxy > Kajagoogoo - Shy
Pictures I've taken
April 4th, 2009 on 5:26 am
Hey, great review – one of the first I’ve read for this camera. Where did you pick yours up? The Camileo S10 has not been released where I live yet, but there are always ways of getting one, if I know where to start.
Thanks.
April 5th, 2009 on 3:58 am
It’s readily available in stores here in the Netherlands
One store based here that I know off that ships to other European countries such as the UK or France is http://www.pixmania.com.
Alternativly here is a complete list of online stores that sell the S10 in the Netherlands.
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/236695/toshiba-camileo-s10.html
Hope that helps a bit.
April 8th, 2009 on 3:18 pm
Hey,
Ik heb een aantal van deze cams es vergeleken via de geijkte web methode Ofwel:
1 youtube filmpjes/reviews
2 specificaties
3 prijs
De negatives die jij noemt hebben vooral betrekking op specificaties die op de meeste andere modellen niet eens voorhanden zijn:
Flip,Creative,Sony Webby, en Kodak (incluis de nieuwe ZX1 die uitkomt) hebben geen optische stabilisatie, een max resolutie van 720P, en geen optische zoom..slechts een volgens gebruikers geheel onbruikbare 2xdigi zoom. Neem daarbij dat de mogelijkheid om via HDMI aan de tv te koppelen niet in alle gevallen aanwezig is, de flip’s geheugen niet uitbreidbaar is, ze allemaam slecht zijn in low-light condities en bovendien gemiddeld 50 euro duurder. Oh had ik al gezegd dat die ander modellen geen stills schieten?
Dan heb ik het niet eens over creatives super slechte customer service en battery quality (heb daar ervaring mee)
Ik zou zeggen houd die s10 nog even.. :-)Kleine cams voor in je broekzak zijn gewoon nog niet zo goed..
Twijfel zelf nog tussen s10, p30 en de nog uitkomende Sanyo VPC 10.
Thanks voor de review en het filmpje ..good stuff!
April 11th, 2009 on 10:49 pm
That sounds like a pretty kickass camcorder. All I have is the crap video option on my digital camera… T_T
April 21st, 2009 on 10:56 pm
The S20 and P20 are identical except that the S20 is slimmer at just 18mm thick. I purchcaced the P20 which in my opinion looked better.
I think that both are just toys. If you use them for more than half an hour you start looking for more settings…which of course are not available.
The shiny LCD panel with no contrast etc. settings makes it hard to shoot in daylight.
Arcsoft software doesn’t work with Vista had to download Arcsoft Mediaimpression 2 trial. Of course I can do the job with other freeware software.
But what could you expect for 109 Euros….
By the way using it with a tripode the quality isn’t that bad.
Check out my Video converted to avi.
file: AVI 1680X1050
size: 436 MB
sound: stereo
duration: 05:49 minutes
shooting conditions: Cloudy, tripode used.
location: Athens Greece
http://rapidshare.com/files/223579824/IMAG0005_1_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/223579998/IMAG0005_1_.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/223580254/IMAG0005_1_.part3.rar
April 26th, 2009 on 10:47 pm
was about to buy one of these but you made me have second thoughts.. I want to try one out before I buy now but don’t know if I will be able to find a test model..
April 26th, 2009 on 10:52 pm
I would recommend the Mino Flip HD if anything.
Why ?
My friends are in Japan right now for a month and they’ve been using that to shoot HD video’s and I have been editing
their raw footage into montages.
The clarity, sharpness and color reproduction are superior to the Toshiba and doesn’t “chug” as much when panning.
Aside from that the low light performance is quite good !
The biggest downside to the Flip Mino HD is that your only doing 60 minutes of footage before having to offload it.
No SD card what-so-ever. But if your making video montages anyway, I always shoot in 30 second bursts so 60 minutes is fine on a day to day basis.
Then again I do not think the internal battery of these small camcorders would last long enough to warrant having 16 + gigabytes of storage to shoot.
May 17th, 2009 on 11:09 am
Hi,
Thank you for this review.
Unfortunately i read this after buying the s10 cam, and after 1st use i’m disappointed.
The mov format is no good for HD. i cannot play the HD mov files with any SW that usually can handle mov (VLC, MP classic) as it was pixeled, fragmented and freezes a lot.
Then i though – i’ll use the ArcSoft but here you say that i doesn’t support the full “HD”. that crazy! why Toshiba provide a SW that doesn’t fully support the product?
If any of you don’t mind telling me with what SW you watched these HD mov files and how converted to AVI i’l be greatful: udizam@hotmail.com
Thank you.
June 17th, 2009 on 12:04 am
@mrVox : I downloaded the videos you posted and I have to say that I’m impressed about the quality. Audio seems fine to me as well.The only thing that bothers me is the popping noise that is pretty much along all the video. I started counting the pops and marking the second they happened:
5,23,34,38,43,1:12,1:56,2:03,2:05,2:09,2:14;2:16,2:22, then it turned too frequent.
Why is this?. I don’t think it has to do with any outdoor noise and certainly is very distracting. Do all of your videos have these?.
Congratulations again on the videos.. they are beautiful and perfect for testing purposes.
June 18th, 2009 on 1:06 pm
Javier@: Thanks for your comment You are right about the popping noise. Well it was a windy day when the video was shot. Maybe this is the cause. I have to say that when you touch the zoom button and the play-stop button the disturbing ‘clicks’ are recorded. There is no way to avoid this. I checked other videos shot in quite environment and there was no popping noise. By the way the voice recording level of the P10 S10 is low and there is no way to adjust it. Of course you can use software like ffdshow audio decoder, while converting your mov files to adjust the voice in higher levels..
June 19th, 2009 on 10:39 am
@mr.Vox: Those are great news. I can handle the play-stop button noise , as it is easy to cut those parts with iMovie or whichever video editing software you use (same goes for audio levels, although I think the video you posted has very good audio -don’t know if it was post-processed).
As for zoom noise, oh well. Anyhow, comming from photography I am used to record things still ;-)
Looks like I will get one, unless you convince me otherwise.
Thanks and cheers from Spain.
June 19th, 2009 on 6:16 pm
Javier@: Have to say that the audio wasn’t post-processed. I was interested on checking the video quality when the video was shot, The audio wasn’t at all impotant to me at that moment.
Purchasing the camera you have nothing to lose but of course there are better choices if you pay a lot more.
The S10 has an aditional feature than the P10 wich is a light for night shooting and is slimmer. No other differences.
Hi from Greece.
August 8th, 2009 on 7:37 am
I bought one to carry around for video of the kids and just family recording stuff. Its never going to be commercial quality, is it? Its a $100 pocket cam with better than average picture quality – just. WYSIWYG.
August 31st, 2009 on 10:12 am
Hey,
I’m interested in buying a cheap but quite good performing camera, and a friend suggested Toshiba Camileo S10…I am a fan of cincerts and i like to record them so i wanna know if the performance is good in that case… Thank you
September 6th, 2009 on 10:26 pm
No, it’s not good for concerts due to the issue it presents at low light; see my example video near the end and see what happens to the lightsources.
The only portable player I can recommend is the Flip Mino HD.
September 7th, 2009 on 11:21 am
The camera has very good quality standing on a tripod and with enough light (outdoors). It is average for handheld use (the digital stabilization isn’t too good) and just poor in low light.
Also, if you buy it make sure you shoot some test videos. I got a first unit that had a visible defocus defect in the lens (it is a fixed focus lens). Returned it and got another which was OK.
It is a very small pockeatable camera (it does get attention) , very cheap and if you play with the limitations, it is worthwhile.
Hope it helps
December 13th, 2009 on 12:52 pm
i am trying to find a sample of s10 in internet to downloand it and see it in my lcd with wd tv live . in this forum mr. vox has a sample but you must pay rapidshare to download it. can somebody else public or send me a saple?
January 19th, 2010 on 6:19 am
Hey, the sample is great if you think about the low price.
February 3rd, 2010 on 1:47 pm
you have a great blog, i bookmarked it so i can get back fast and often, good luck.