Saturday, February 23, 2008

Sanyo HD1000

Have been playing with the Sanyo XACTI HD1000 camera. It's a full 16x9, 1080i camera that fits in your pocket. It's rugged and simple, with excellent battery life and easy to use controls.

Later this week I will send the picture to a 50 inch flat screen--via the HD1000 docking station's HDMI output. It will be interesting to see how the picture compares to HDV.

The only downside i can see so far is the camera's smallness. HD is very sensitive to jiggle-cam. Although the HD1000 has excellent optical image stabilization (OIS), it's still a tiny cam and difficult to hold steady.

Overall the cam looks pretty impressive. It's H.264 compressed video records to an inexpensive standard SD chip. Plug the chip into a Windows machine, and you can edit the video easily.

Journalists and interviewers have been using the cam for research interviews.

This weekend I bought a cheap Sony lavaliere (lav) mike and a mini to micro-mini plug adapter so I can use the lav mike on the HD1000.

After playing with the cam for a while, I recommended it to a doc filmmaker as a second cam to use on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. The HD1000 may be a good way to get candid 'on the spot' interviews in HD.

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