Testing:
Looking deeper at the body design of this camera made me question one thing, something I later found out has been questioned by other reviewers as well; why is every plug except the dock plug covered? We all know that if this dock plug gets damaged or wet and fails that a lot of important functionality would be lost, especially the HDMI abilities which are now only available on the dock (HMX10A had HDMI on the camera too). I liked the slide-cover design on the USB and component/AV connections so why not incorporate something like that onto this critical dock plug too? My minor personal beef with another part of the design was the mode selection switch. Since you have to wait for each mode to fully initialize before switching to the next, it would seem more practical to install a small switch so I can easily jump from mode 1, video recording, to mode 3, playback, without the delay. Other than that, I had no major complaints in the general design of this camera.

Taking a look at the video mode did leave me very impressed. I could jump right into things if I wanted, or spend time tweaking advanced settings, and I was happy with the end result either way. I give Samsung kudos on the Q.Menu. Once I got used to this little button it made many adjustments and tweaks a lot faster. For those looking for point-and-shoot simplicity, enable EasyQ. This function will lock out all those advanced menus so you can have simple high-definition videos without all the confusion of mucking around with settings menus. Connecting the camera to my computer to offload the video showed me two new removable drives; one for the camera's internal memory and one for the memory card slot. After checking out a few videos I made, I was left thoroughly impressed with the quality. Let me point out one thing I did start to notice with this camera compared to the HMX10C and SC-X210L cameras I compared it against. The focal length on the new HMX20C seems to be almost a tad longer than it should be for close-quarter filming. Outdoors and in large rooms it's fine and you probably won't even notice this. However, when I set a few objects on my desk and put the HMX20C up against another camera on the same point, the 20C left more of the desk cut off than the other contenders. How much you will notice this will greatly depend on the type of filming you do and how you operate your camera. If you take a few steps back, it's just as good as any other camera in this regards. You just may not be able to film some things quite as close if you want to fit a lot into your frame.

Switching over to camera mode and snapping a few shots, I was also left quite happy. This camera has a great improvement in picture quality over the HMX10A, and it was very noticeable. I was glad to see the integration of a flash into the HMX20C which certainly takes this still camera another step up over the HMX10A. In both poor light (where flash had to be used) and good natural light, the pictures certainly turned out great for being a 4MP camera. Keep in mind it's obviously not going to match up to a modern 7+MP digital camera, but it's not bad either. Check out my shots below to see what I mean. I'm happy to see that Samsung has incorporated a lot of feature control into the still photo mode as well. It does a great job of mimiking a basic digital photo camera when it comes to the settings. As I always say with digital video cameras though, buy them first for the video quality because that will be your main reason for buying them. The picture quality is simply a nice extra. Most people own a good digital camera these days anyway's, especially those looking to buy a good digital video camera.

Below you will see a downsized photograph I took with the HMX20C. Due to image size and bandwidth usage, I only altered the resolution of this picture.