Choice, as every shopper recognizes, is both a godsend and a nightmare. It's great to be able to compare lots of versions of the same basic product, but almost impossible to weigh up all the pros and cons accurately to make a swift decision to buy. This is particularly evident when buying a new digital camera, whether for moving or still pictures - especially as most digital cameras will perform both functions with varying degrees of success.

Canon's HR10 camcorder is a case in point. Whereas its high definition predecessors recorded on hard drive (HG10) and MiniDV tape (HV20), the HR10 captures its images on 8cm DVDs and the quartet of formats will be complete shortly when the HF10 and HF100 are released with dual flash memory recording. So what are the advantages and negatives of the DVD version?

Well, it uses the same 2.96-megapixel Full HD CMOS sensor and Digic DV II processor as the other two formats, allied to an HD Video lens with 10x optical zoom and Super Range Optical Image Stabilizer to cut down on the effects of camera shake.

However, it's naturally restricted by the medium as to how much recording time you can allow for. The HR10 uses DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-R Dual Layer disks to produce 1080i HD movies and, although the CMOS shoots at a high resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, it then converts it to interlaced video at 1,440 x 1,080.

In terms of duration and quality of recordings, the lowest setting (Long Play) is set at 5Mbps and manages a maximum of 33 minutes with single layer disks and 60 minutes at Dual Layer. Standard Play increases to 7Mbps, High Quality (XP) is 9Mbps and the highest setting (XP+) is 12Mbps which only provides you with 15 minutes on Single Layer. By contrast, the HG10's highest setting is 15Mbps, its 40Gb storage will record up to 15 hours of footage and its battery pack has twice the life.

You do, however, have the additional 25P Progressive Recording within the Cinema Mode setting that the HG10 has, and you have special scene recording settings (including Sports, Beach, Snow, Spotlight, Sunset and Fireworks) as well as five image effects (e.g. low sharpening, soft skin detail) and four digital effects (Fade, Black & White, Sepia and Art). In relatively good lighting conditions the colours emerge sharp, bright, vivid and authentic, but these become noisier as lighting conditions deteriorate, though not more than you'd expect for an AVCHD system.

Because you're recording via AVCHD, you won't be able to take the DVD out of your camera and put it straight into a DVD player, but you can use the supplied Corel software (Ulead DVD Movie Factory SE, DVD Movie Writer SE and InterVideo WinDVD SE) to edit and record to another DVD on your PC or play your movies out directly via the HDMI, Component or AV terminals.

While Canon has done its best to make the HR10 compatible in quality with its big sisters in the HDD and MiniDVD domains (and mostly succeeded), it is ultimately hampered by the severe recording limitations of the DVD format.