After fooling with some of the menu options, I started playing with some of the auto-white balance features. They put so much thought into creating settings that work with real world applications. Of course you can manually adjust the white balance, but why would you when you can auto-adjust for Tungsten, two types of fluorescents, shade, cloudy, and daylight and actually have them look extremely polished? Another cool feature is the amazing range of depth of field you can achieve with such a small camera. Compared to some of the prosumer camera options available 5-7 years ago, the Vixia makes available the ability to easily capture stunning naturally vignetted images comparable to pro-video and film cameras. This feature, added with the Vixia's native 24p Cine mode, offers just about everything a filmmaker needs to replicate a believable film-look.
Of course, the bottom line here is that the Vixia's usability was quite impressive. All of the options were quite accessible and really the only challenge to using the Vixia is figuring out the multiple ways to do certain things. There's alot of flexibility here, despite the lack of traditional external buttons and switches.
Alright getting into the touch screen menu features. Pretty convenient. Also makes the camera a lot prettier, without a lot of messy buttons.
Depth of Options
What is notably different with this model is the touch screen features that work similar to the iPhone. The pressure sensitive screen is quite cool, and the only real problem I had with it was the tiny scroll bar on the side of the menu that had me accidentally tapping buttons with my bulbous, clumsy fingers. But to really just leave the touch screen options at the menu would really be missing the point, because there are a ton of options available within the screen. These options include on-screen zoom controls, on-screen touch and track controls, and touch-screen focus. That's right...touch-screen focus! Just tap what you want and it actually focuses cleanly on it. (It works so well that it thankfully renders the Vixia's little knobby focus thing kind of pointless.)
Touch screen zoom is an option that seems worthless at first, but you find yourself coming back to time and time again.
The touch and track is particularly sweet. Just touch an object on the screen, say a cup of coffee, and no matter where that cup of coffee moves, the Vixia keeps it locked in focus. This option, matched with 3-second pre-record, lends itself nicely to event recording on the fly.
