So it is my son's first birthday. Have we used the camcorder since Christmas? Of course not. Cassette is stuck. No pictures of first birthday :( Do a little online research to troubleshoot, turns out this is a known problem with many of the Canon camcorders. This camera has literaly been used three times and of course, the warrenty expired about a week ago. Canon charges minimum of $145 for service plus shipping, so why bother. Get a Sony!

Have this brand new Canon ZR85 for about 3 weeks. All satisfaction so far except 1 serious mechanical feature. Explain below:

This camcorder is for making movie, that means "move" (not still). The tape is for 1 hour, that means need to mount on something that move rather than to hold steady by hand and move arround to capture movie for that whole hour.

I mount the camcorder on a swivel head from Bogen-Manfrotto, and the swivel head mount on my bicycle. I ride the bike on fairly good pave road with little road vibration to record scenery for several hours.

Turn out that the camcorder mounting base is made out of non-metal (plastic) can not take vibration and the thread become damage. Is this considered that user's abusing or manufacturer false to not design carefully for the "mov"ie device?

I have to turn myself to become a "tripod" now since my ZR85 has no longer usable mounting base.

I got this as christmas gift, and used it mostly indoors, sometime at night, for the past month. The still pictures came out very bad. That doesn't bother me much since I have digital cameras. However, this camera is very poor indoors, even with the night mode, the video came with very high background, color granules everywhere. it is much worse than the old miniDV I have, a Sharp model I got in 2001, which is very bulky but has been very reliable. I made two DVD side by side, and the one with Canon looks horrible. Outdoor shots are fair, but many occasions I have to take shots indoor or at night. I would go with other models if possible.

The camera is very easy to use, and is small and handy. It has more functions than you'd really want in such a camera -- if you are ever going to do something with the footage you will be using a computer and an editing program, so you don't really need the editing modes on the camera. Still, there's no complaint here, and it's flexible enough for most users.

My only complaint is that for some reason on my camera when I flipped the lcd viewer around to see from the front the image didn't rotate. I know it's supposed to do this, and it did it with the model at the store. Or: when I closed the lcd viewer with it flipped around the image shut off and I couldn't see it anymore. I'm assuming this had to do with a bad wire. But, I had no problem returning it to get a new one, so this wasn't a huge problem, only inconvenient.

All in all I would say that this is a solid entry-level camcorder, that is fairly priced and easy to use.

This cam does it all. Your sheach for a camcorder has ended. It has 2 hours of battery life with the veiwfinder , 1 with the lcd screen. Thats good. The digtal effects are cool.And you are able to connect to the computer for buring dvds and more digital effects