Canon's horizontal design solves certain problems, but also made for a larger camcorder. You can fit the HV20 into a jacket pocket, but it might be a tight fit depending on the jacket. Part of the reason for its size is the HV20's nice, big, 10x optical, f/1.8 to f/3 zoom lens, which includes the company's Super-Range Optical Image Stabilization. Unlike standard optical image stabilization, this version incorporates feedback from the processor to fine-tune its shake-fighting adjustments. In our field tests, it proved effective well past the typical 75 percent of the room range, but still couldn't perfectly steady our handheld shots when zoomed out to the 10x maximum. Instant Auto Focus, which employs a helper sensor on the front of the tape compartment to measure the distance to your subject, proved very fast indeed. But it slowed considerably in low light, which is just as much of a challenge for the helper sensor as it is for a normal AF sensor. Be sure you don't accidentally cover up the helper sensor, or your AF performance will slow to subsonic speeds. We also noticed a tendency for the HV20's AF to hunt, especially in moderate-to-low light, and it occasionally focused on the wrong thing, such as a fence rather than what was behind the fence. Both of these issues seemed to happen more at the far, 10x end of the zoom.