The Seventh Affordable HD Camcorder...
 

...the Sanyo VPC-HD1

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Sanyo-Announces-$800-First-High-Definition-SD-Recording-Camcorder.htm

I know that a similar post has been posted in the News Forum, but this really is a HiDef Camera and should have its own section Chris ;)

Personally I am very excited. Yes the quality will be nowhere near as good as the HDV cams, but the thing will cost $799 and you can slip it in your pocket. Plus at 1280x720x30p I doubt it will be much worse than the original JVC one-chipper that started it all. Plus it will have lots of manual controls - aperture, shutter speed and even an ND filter.

So I vote for a new section for this little baby :)

The camera is very low end. It is more of a still camera with video function. I think that this site is geared towards more professional tools. The Sanyo would be a nice vacation camera, probably with poor low light performance, nothing more, or does anyone want to make an indie feature, a wedding video, or an MTV clip with it?

I must agree with Petr. I'm trying to steer DV Info Net more toward the middle to high end. Camcorder Info already does an excellent job of covering the consumer range.

True, but I bet it could be mounted in places where even the HC1 would not fit...

I agree with Petr and Chris too...
Otherwise we could make all new subboards for every new consumercam that comes on the market... And we would end up with empty boards with little and most likely unusefull information for the people that mostly visit this site/forum...

I still think that somebody should test this camera, because depending on which version of mpeg4 and how long the gop is (as with a solid state format you only need a key frame when needed for scene changes = a fraction of the keyframes of the normal HDV) this 9.3Mb/s could match the JVC HD1. I hold little hope, but worth a check out under extreme scene movement/changes, checking for fine pixel blocking.

Then that somebody should be you, Wayne.

I would love to (and to keep it) but I'm spending the money on another camera. But I didn't mean somebody "should" should, but that it is still worth somebody with the camera doing it, or that it is a professional camera that requires a forum. My apologies for saying it the wrong way.

Thanks.

The demo footage didn't impress over at camcorderinfo, so maybe that is the way it is heading. Another reason I don't want to buy the Sanyo yet (apart from no 25fps support) is that I'm waiting to see equivalent cameras based on the ambarella chip which uses a better quality Mpeg4 part 10, h264 assuming, that the Sanyo only uses regular mpeg4, as seems to be the case). I'm only hoping for a match with the JVC HD1, not the superior HC1. So I would be willing to do a comparison, except I lack the cameras and money to buy them all.

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content...der-Review.htm

Just forget it Wayne. Can you imagine any pro showing up with this camera at a client? The camera has something like 5 MP on 1/2.5" CCD. Do you think that the Sanyo lens will resolve this? What F-stop does the camera have at the max. telephoto setting? What's the wide angle? I'm sure it would be called normal angle by everyone else but Sanyo. Do you know what reputation Sanyo has among consumers? Very little! How about among professionals? Sanyo always made low end electronics. They always cut corners. The brand has no quality image. Their products live up to their image, so most of the stuff they make they have to OEM to others, because no one really wants a Sanyo. Nice toy though.

let Wait and Test, but the prospects are poor...
 

Although i usually dislike the "theoretical without a theory" discussions about untested products, i am going, this time to feed these speculations:

Remark 1: if i look at the MPEG4 "realtime" encoding performed by the previous SD versions of the xacti, we may fear the worse. I have experimented on these; it turns out that the definition is NOT at ALL what it claims to be. Supposedly "dv quality" turns to be indeed nearer to 400*300 rather than 720*576. And it is also true that any decent MPEG4 encoder will recompress the Sanyo stream by a factor of 3 to 4 without loosing any "visible quality", which "clearly" shows the poor efficiency of the "online encoding" techniques used in this case.

Remark 2: editing such footage will add to the nightmare. To the best of my knowledge MPEG4 is uneditable natively to day on classical machines. ( Is it really anywhere?). Therefore an other conversion will be needed , in which format ? Cineform style AVI ? We just ask them here...

Lest Wait and Test and See...

Yes, http://www.ambarella.com/technology/compression.htm mentioned competitor's mpeg4 h264 solution using mpeg2 compression with mpeg4 syntax. I wonder if this is the sort of thing meant? We can only hope for a change, and even for them to be using the ambarella chip, but ambarella should have been crowing about it if they were.

It is funny, I notice a picture of a camera on their front page, which camera is that? It is using a yellow VW Beetle on the LCD screen similar to what I've seen on a promo of some camera in times past.

your comparison would not be relevant to a camera that fully utilizes the h.264 specification... it's a whole lot better than the original mpeg4 codec.

one place that you are going to see those h.264 chips a lot is in cell phone video recording, believe it or not.

it meant that the competitor's mpeg4 h.264 solution did not fully utilize the h.264 spec, so the picture quality was less than optimal... it was still h.264 video, but not as good as it could have been.

for example, several weeks ago i encoded several nero h.264 files for the ipod, as a test for someone out here at dvinfo.net... i can't find the thread right now, but his ipod would not play h.264 that used bi-directional prediction(aka, "quicktime compatible", as nero called it).

which means that the ipod is not fully h.264 compatible... you have to cripple the picture quality of your video encoding to get the file to play on the ipod.

you have to understand the effects of things like bi-directional prediction to fully appreciate what h.264 offers.

Yes, that's what I meant. This cameras codec might be an improvement over previous models, and the full h264 one I mentioned, might be an improvement over it.

That bi-directional prediction, is that where is looks for a visual detail match in subsequent or previous frames?

I have further news.

I have been doing further research, and would definitely advise comparing this camcorder to competing offerings during the year.

Here is a review with some footage:

http://www.akihabaranews.com/news-10...+monster!.html

Here is somebody that has seen footage, and other Sanyo/mpeg4 users talking about their experiences with previous models, improvements, and mpeg4 encoding.

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content...der-Review.htm