I sought advice through this forum when looking for a decent camera to do interviews, and eventually purchased the A1. I used it for the first time last week and was blown away by it.

The picture quality is outstanding. I used to own an XL1S and eventually sold it in disgust because I was so disappointed in the quality of the picture - but this cam is a whole new ball of wax.

For these particular interviews, I used manual settings all the way and adjusted the white balance to warm the picture up a little, which leads me to my one and only gripe - the LCD screen is totally unreliable as a reference for picture quality (warmth, brightness etc...) and it is way brighter than the eventual image.

Fortunately I only ever rely on a properly calibrated monitor for such shoots and took along a SONY 13" monitor (the one from my edit suite) and connected it using the component connection. Thus, I was able to produce exactly the color balance I wanted.

I used a decent high quality lav mic and found the quality of the audio to be perfect.

By the way...I recorded in standard definition (16:9) which is perfectly adequate for what I wanted. In fact the quality of the image from this camera is equally as good as a Sony Betacam system I rented about a year ago for the same project.

Great job Canon...really great value for money.

You can go into the menu and adjust the LCD brightness down. Pop up your bars to do so. Still, it's not reliable and no LCD should be used to judge exposure or color.