In addition to the cool touchscreen features, the Canon Vixia offers a lot of traditional, yet highly useful options that makes it a great expandable camera. These options include tele and wide lens adaptors, on-camera lighting (compatible with the camera's smart shoe terminal), and fully manual audio controls with a mic jack for easily adding pro-audio to your shoots.
Touch and track works a lot like face detect, but works on any object. Just touch the object you want to keep in focus/exposed and the camera does the rest.
Performance
In terms of workflow, converting the AVC footage through Final Cut was a dream. Transferring through Log & Transfer was simple, fast, and painless. Of course many of us are dreaming of the day where we can work in AVC native on Final Cut.
One thing that struck me about the Vixia is that it just doesn’t feel very rugged. Because it’s such a tiny camera, I wish they would put some armour around it. There were multiple times where I felt I could have dropped it at just waist level and it would shatter into a million pieces. Since the core camera is so tiny, I wouldn't mind if subsequent models would have some reinforced protection around them, even if that meant adding some weight and size to it.
Touch screen focus let's you do complex rack focuses right on screen. A lot better than fiddling with that pesky focus knob.
I tested this camera out at a local concert. The shooting conditions were not ideal. I was hanging over a balcony, without a tripod, and at the mercy of the night club for lighting. The Vixia worked out great on many levels. For one, the camera was light and small enough to hold comfortably for the entire set. The auto-stabilization made it so a tripod wasn't even necessary. And I used the on screen zoom and record controls to access these features easily, while standing in an awkward position. Oh yeah, the on-camera mic with auto-attenuation created a rather great recording, in fact I burned a CD of the set to listen to in my car.
