One of the beautiful things about this camera is the six assign buttons added, to these buttons you can ‘assign’ any menu function - so for example I have A1 set to WB + and A2 set to WB -, changing my white balance on the fly. Battery usage is quite simply great, on the larger batteries 367Mins is the max that I have had, this translates to around about 145Mins of usage if you consider all the time that your not using the camera. Tape format is a bit of a misnomer really, MiniDV | DVCam | HDV. You can record in any format from those above but the recommendation is a tape per type eg. DVCam on DVCam tapes, but I don’t see any reason why you can’t capture HDV on to MiniDV, the tape format is the same. Obviously focusing is important in any film, but more so in HiDef, get it wrong and you’ve got a piece of garbage. The HVR now has an ‘expanded focus’ button, when pressed it temporarily enlarges the view to 2x, enabling perfect focus. For the price this is a fantastic piece of kit, good weight, excellent image quality, good price and overall usability. 8/10. posted by irregular activity