Jony Upper, danke! Nice samples:)

native files
 

Yes, thanks very much for posting those. I fooled around with them for a bit in After Effects. Looks good on an SD screen, and good on my CRT.

The auto-exposure looks a little "steppy."

Had a look at those clips, which I assume are unprocessed originals. Better, can still see the problem on the black trousers and faces (more evident if you put the brightness down and contrast up) and anti aliasing. Is it my imagination, or is motion better than we expected. On the woman walking in front of the child left to right just after the yellow balloon appears you can see a lot of blocking on the head, and other areas of movement, even slow movement on mouth, but on others very little. Things that move don't seem to blur out unless they are moving fast enough (except maybe the newspaper text/hairs) to form blur in the shutter interval. The latitude problem is not really improved.

Fast panning, waves and low light shots would tell a lot of what's left.

A great consumer camera, certainly makes Flash cameras more viable for consumers. If this had came out a few years ago we would want one. I'll wait for higher bit rate h264 cameras.

Re-edit: I forgot to mention about the motion blur, that I don't know for certain that it isn't still there, because VLC won't zoom the video on this system.

Anyone got one yet?
 

I see the price has dropped on eBay down to £488 including shipping to UK.....

I have a 4GB MMCPlus card which should hold more like a DV tape worth of video, anyone any idea if they work in it?

Cheers

Jamie

Well. I have a Xacti C1 (first model) and it works ok with mmc. Never tried 4gb model.

Im planing to buy the HD1 shortly. The C1 is a little toy but i have enjoyed a lot this camera. Is always with me in my pocket. The video quality of course is poor, but sometimes you only want to capture a special moment to remeber it later, and quality is not as important in that situations.
Is ready to shot in a half second, the battery lasts a lot. (You can easily record 2 hours of video without charging). The menus are clear and fast to navigate.

I hope that the new Xacti will be the same in this aspects.


pd: Anyone wants a cheap C1? ; )

Has anyone seen the specs on the compression format for this camera? Is it just a variation on H.263? I'm kind of wondering how much color information they're able to get into a format that compressed. To me the footage looks amazing for something that came out of a camera the size of a cell phone.

The footage looks amazing, however there's more to a 'pro' camera than image quality.

Let's just hope they release a prosumer version with lots of control and options.

I just don't see anyone making mildly serious films with a tiny piece like this!

Heh...whatever. People made serious films with cameras that only had a crank and a lens. You probably wouldn't use something like this for narrative fiction, but I've already preordered one. I'm doing a documentary right now on the nuclear industry and a lot of times it's been a hassle getting bulky gear into the places I want to shoot. Something like this could always be in my jacket. I imagine I'll get a ton of mileage out of it.

Well, I mentioned *serious films*, not industrial or any other type of documentary. Besides if this cam is always in full auto you're quite limited in what you can achieve.

Well, you can manually set focus points, ISO and white balance. It's not complete control by any stretch of the imagination, but if you know enough about how the camera works I'm sure you can "achieve" quite a bit, as the examples posted have already shown.

The examples posted here don't resemble in the slightest a film production.

Just face it: no manual control and quick-access buttons and you're left with a toy camera. Consumer yes, PROsumer, don't think so. And if that wasn't the case nobody would bother wasting $3k+ on XL2s, Z1s, DVXs, etc.

They have the technology, just give us a semi-pro version, that's all I'm asking.

Heh...don't take this so personally. The camera is the size of a cell phone. It's not being marketed to people shooting a feature. And yet it has some manual controls and apparently delivers excellent quality for a small, pocket camera.

And FWIW, the examples from a Viper or a Varicam don't "resemble in the slightest a film production." Digital doesn't look like film. I love my Olympus E-1, but you're never going to mistake my RAW files for film.

In addition to that, small chips all look pretty crappy. I know that might be a point of contention with some people, but IMO the differences in quality between a $5k 720p camera and the examples posted from the HD-1 are notable, but not nearly as notable as the differences I see in footage I shoot on Super-8mm and footage I shoot on 35mm. That's a night and day difference. This? Not so much.

For a "toy camera", Sanyo is apparently delivering a product that can hold its own with much more expensive cameras. And delivering it at a price that makes it practical to have a couple of them sitting around in addition to whatever uber-prosumer stuff you also have sitting around. I think it's way cool. I'm sure there are all kinds of drawbacks to shooting with it. It will probably be prone to flare and artifacting in harsh contrast and pixelating during shots featuring a lot of motion and all kinds of things that will make it totally impractical for shooting big-budget action film, but in certain applications it will undoubtedly be indistinguishable from a $5k prosumer camera. The smart man will be finding out what those applications are and using things like this in ways that show off its strengths.

Obviously you guys haven't seen " The Celebration " or Festen , dir. by Thomas Vinterberg in 1998. Won the Cannes Jury award , nominated for the Golden Palm shot with a sony pc3 one-chip matchbook palmcorder. Checkout this link>
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154420/awards
Doesn't make a diddleysquat what camera you shoot a masterpiece on. If Fellini or Kubrick only had this camera to shoot their films , we'd still have great films. When will this concept sink in ? Truth is , if you get lost chasing the technology you never arrive at the art. That said , these new small formfactor cameras are a boon to any kind of genre if they find themseves used in the right hands. Kurth

Nicely said, man. Stan Brakhage made his landmark films on cheap gear. When his 16mm gear was stolen he used 8mm for a while. It isn't the gear that defines the filmmaker. And in the case of something like this Sanyo with so much potential and at a price point where so many people can afford it, I think discouraging the use of these little cameras is almost a sin.

"Nah, it may be 720p, but you don't want it, man! It ain't got a Waterhouse singularity or an Ebson drive. Just won't do at all..."