Is there a screen in the menu that will show me the hours of use on an HV-20?

If not, is there a trick or technique to display this on a monitor?

If no to both, how do you get the hours of use? Thanks.

I haven't read the manual but I would think if there was an hours of use meter on the camera, it would tell you how. The HV20 is my 3rd digital camcorder and frankly I have never heard of such a feature. I guess by hours of use you mean the amount of time that the camera is powered on and not the different types of usage such as record, playback, fast forward, or rewind.

I would gage approximate usage by how many tapes you have run through the camera and total the amount of minutes recorded on each tape. This should give you a ball park figure on camera usage.

Not possible for any Canon camcorder, unfortunately.

Keeping track of it manually via written logbook is your best bet.

It would be neat to learn total power-on minutes were actually logged somewhere by the firmware, but I've never heard of this in my limited experience.

The only metric I can think of is tracking the number of tapes run through the camera gives you the hours on the recording heads, not including re-recorded tapes.

Mulitply that by anywhere from 2-4x for total hours on the tape transport system for review and ingest.

Plus the hours spent just powered on playing around with the thing--wow this is starting to feel like estimating business travel mileage for the IRS.

I've owned an HV-20 for about five months, but I'm happy to report my original Elura from 1999 is still working, with just one servicing for the tape
mechanism.

Jim

Before getting an XH-A1 and an HV-20 I only had Sony and JVC cameras. The Sony cameras and decks I have all give hours. I think the JVC does, too, but I don't remember now.

Surprised to hear that none of the Canon camcorders do. I would expect the higher end ones, like the XH and XL cameras would.

Canon never has offered it for any of their camcorders, XL series included.