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..."

thanks-Kurth

While I don't suggest that this camera is pro quality, it is certainly better than nothing, or probably many Mini-DV cameras. It has many manual features for a camera of the size/type, but if you want full manual control than just put a slr/film lens adaptor on it, lock everything all the auto's, and off you go. I think the camera is a step in the right direction, h264 higher bit rate is the next step.

I hear people saying the stuff about content versus film quality a fair bit, but the truth is that a good image makes a good film look twice as good, but a great image only makes being bored by bad content, tolerable. So yes, go for the best you can conveniently get for the moment. I am looking forward to seeing what the higher bit-rate h264 cameras have to offer.

Wayne - you're right about getting the best quality that's "conveniently" available at the moment, however a high resolution image never , ever helped to make bad content "tolerable". Maybe if it was great cinematography then that would be one element that could help bad content , but just the quality of the image, sorry .
About the Samsung (H.264) coming down the pikes , agreed. It will " probably" be better than the Sanyo. Samsung is taking off. They just released a new dslr. I'm certain they're ready to butt heads with the big guys. I want a smallform camera . I doubt if it will be the Sanyo. However , in a year ( I can wait that long ) if pany and sony come out with their own , and then Sanyo drops to $400 , then , well , who knows, esp. if this camera performs well enough.
I've always been in agreement with Cocteau , when he said filmmaking will be an art when the cost is equal to drawing , i.e. a pencil and paper. The most compelling content I've seen , and I watch alot , in the past 10 years is Bill Viola's " The Passing ". It was made using hi8 and s8 cameras. Robert mentions Brakhage. Another case in point, like Mcclaren, Mekas , Snow , Campus, etc. etc , all of the experimental work in 8 & 16mm and video that occurred before we were so technologically hellbent on reproducing the look of a major motion picture. Of course this site is mainly devoted to the technoloical aspects. So , I can hardly wait to begin to read comparisons and download some more footage from this and other cameras in its' class. Kurth

If you look at the films of the French New Wave there are a lot of technical problems. We watched Breathless in class once and I remember that after the film someone said the synch was so bad it was like watching a Sergio Leone film. I guess it all depends on how you look at it. To me it's always amazing that a bunch of A/V nerd journalists were around at a time when cameras became small and affordable enough for them to make films of their own. The technical aspects of what they did weren't always perfect, but they captured a lot of great moments in time. Little cameras like this will enable a lot of people to grab moments of time in higher quality and at a lower price than ever before.

Kurth. I have supreme patience/tolerance sometimes, so yes I can sit through bad garbage just to record it with my eyes, though bad footage with bad content not only bores but annoys when I could be reading instead (and don't do much reading nowadays because of reading problems, that's how annoying it is).

I'm not saying that a great picture will give a bad film as much of a boost as a good film will get. Double next to no appeal is still next to "no" appeal. I'm sure, if most of you guys were compelled to watch feature releases on VHS, you would be wanting to watch it on DVD instead, very very much, and most of us want HD dvd/Bluray one day. For instance, on TV last night, on separate stations, as I was posting, at the same time, was "Arrested Development", and "Curb your Enthusiasm", one looks twice as good as the other (and the content is maybe twice as good too). Even though I don't really like the one with better content either, I can watch it, if it had the picture of the other, I probably wouldn't. The other, if it had a picture at least as good as the first one, I would be able to put up with it, if I didn't have anything better to do. So, if you got something it doesn't usually hurt to make it look twice as good, it's easier on the audience (and that means commercially). But if your beating a dead horse, than beating it further with a good picture, might give you a 0.2% audience penetration than a 0.1% penetration ;). I'm sure the film processing look they use in feature films, would be done deliberately to have the best psychological response from the audience. Just a different way of looking at it.

Kurth, you won't have to wait long for an alternative, in March, h264 cameras are supposed to be announced at around $799, by the looks of it, at faster bit rates. In August (or was that September) or so, Samsung is supposed to release one at higher bit rates too.

That's the problem, I've been to Arts college as well, and you find yourself surrounded by some pretty "interesting" people in class, and giving the classes (well, especially in some parts of Australia) who have some "interesting" ideas that are totally unrepresentative of what the audience wants ;). The problem is, that many of these people perceive what they are looking at, very differently from what the audience perceives, and while we can stretch our imaginations, the bulk of the population doesn't see it, but will notice the low quality footage that we ignore because we are concentrating on other parts of the content. This perception problem is one reason that knuckle brained blockbusters work many times better than the best arts films with the majority of the population, because they are appealing to emotional centres that the audience can perceive and care about. There are two things that can be done, make it easier to watch in comfort (good picture, good cinematography, as Kurth said) and teach them what they are seeing as you go, so they have the clues to perceive what they are watching. Something I learnt from the advances in Psychological research in the 80's and 90's, was that they found that men were many times more receptive to listen to women if the women calmly and politely talked to them rather than if they aggressively confronted the men (which is something men don't normally do to each other unless they want a fight, a major advance for feminism). But this is a clue to what is happening in film, you can aggressively agree with the audience (violent propagandist incitement etc) but the other extreme is to lull the audience into a calm/pleasant/enjoyable/restful/low stress (mellow) and/or exciting/interesting, state, so they can concentrate on the story better. Part of that non distracting look, is good picture and sound. Such a low stress look can be gotten on a better camera (which will even make it easier to post process in). Probably, eventually, an Ultra high definition 16-bit 4:4:4 visually lossless camera with 20 stop latitude, low signal to noise to match, and high light conversion efficiency, good glass, and software programs to do artificial pro-quality auto focusing, lighting, latitude ranging, colour correction and framing etc (totally doable) will probably replace much of the need for lighting, camera adjustment etc one day, allowing the cost and hassle, of low end production to drop.

Robert, exactly my sentiments as well.

Hi, my first post here.

I'm interested on this hd1, so i'm trying to find out every bit of info about this camera. Here is some words i found surfing and i want to share....

------------------------------------------------------------------
from:
http://www.japaninc.net/newsletters/?list=gw&issue=222

So i wonder if you dont consider price, storage will be not a problem.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The optics, from konica - minolta:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/NEWS/1136412541.html

http://www.sanyo.co.jp/koho/hypertex...1/0111-1e.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A photo of the main chip and the famous "platinum engine" Mpeg4 coder:

http://www.sanyo-dsc.com/products/li...ie_image01.jpg

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm waiting for a review of some of you, guys. There's already some units sold on ebay, com'on nobody from this forums bought it?

Jorge

[Jorge, since you're new here, I'll ask that you not copy/paste text from other websites. Links are fine, but copy/paste violates the other website's copyrights. We try to avoid that here.-moderator]

Sorry, first and last time i do it.

Anybody tried to burn a Dvd with the Mpeg4 original footage of the hd1 and tried to play it on a Mpg4 compatible Dvd player?

I was thinking on waiting for the H264 cameras, but if it is difficult to edit "old" mpeg4 standard, h264 could be worse.
More, you have to wait for a h264 player to view the film if you dont want to hassle with computers or docking station.

Perhaps i could take a little bit less quality codec for a more confortable editing+viewing.

Jorge, thanks for the links. The one of the Mpeg4 chip shows that it is indeed a Sony chip, not an Ambarella chip. I haven't noticed the 60fps VGA mode that uses 6Mb/s, going to be interesting for extreme sports people.

Jorge, the footage posted before tells the story pretty much, all we need to know is low light performance and things like wave/ripple motion etc. Great personal camera or compact. Get your hands on one and test it out.

About the H264 Ambarella camera, I can't remember the in and outs of the details but the chip used to encode the h264 is a mass array of little special purpose processors, probably more powerful combined, than your average PC processor on this job. I don't know for certain, but I remember reading about editing on camera (or was it the Sanyo). Undesirable I know, but at least you won't be totally left up the creek without a paddle if you can find the camera that supports it.

I think there are a number of DVD players etc, with h264 to come out, and if xbox360 or PS3, or Nintendo Revolution decides to support it, you definitely won't be left up the creek as far as playback devices go.

Got One!
 

I have been reading the messages here for a while, but never registered.

I got my Sanyo HD1 today, so I registered so I could share sample pictures and video.

The video has a lot more compression artifacts then I would have liked to see and some of the shots look a bit blurred.

I will leave these clips up for a little while.

Let me know what you think:

Videos:

www.gamersden.com/hd1test/T1.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/T2.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/T3.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/T4.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/T5.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/T5.MP4

Stills:

www.gamersden.com/hd1test/ST1.JPG
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/ST2.JPG
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/ST3.JPG

--With a tripod--

Videos:

www.gamersden.com/hd1test/Cereal.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/left.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/right.MP4
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/trash.MP4

Stills:

www.gamersden.com/hd1test/Cereal.JPG
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/left.JPG
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/right.JPG
www.gamersden.com/hd1test/trash.JPG

Right click and the links and save them to your hard drive. If you just click the links directly it will take a very long time to buffer up and you may have playback problems.

Well, you can certainly tell the image is under the squeeze, but I honestly don't have a problem with what I see. It's a teeny, tiny HD camera. I really appreciate you taking the time to get these files up where we could see them. I can hardly wait for mine to show up.

Do you mind me asking what kind of card you're using and if you ever get an interruption in recording due to the speed of the card? Ever since I saw that footnote about short continuous record times with some cards I've been wondering whether or not there would be problems with the media bottlenecking somehow.

The crunchiness of the compression is something I'd kind of expected. It would be cool if it wasn't there, but to me it doesn't seem nearly as bad as it could be. The exteriors show it worst, IMO. Big landscap-y stuff always seems to suffer from edge enhancement-itis and motion chunkiness.

Again, very cool of you to share with us. Thank you!

-Rob

Rob,

True, the image is not that bad considering, but after using my Sony Z1.... ;)

I did the test images with a SanDisk UltraII 2.0GB card. I belive it is a 66x card.

I got another card via FedEX right after I was done testing. It is a 4GB 150x Transend. It works!

On both cards there is around a two second delay from when I press the record button to when it starts recording. After the clip there is no delay I from what I can tell. Of course even the slower card is 10x faster then the video bit rate.

One thing with the 4GB 150x Transend SD card. It works fine in the camera and shows 58 minutes of available recording time in the best quality 720P mode. It records and plays back video. But, I can't read the card on my laptop's SD slot. It says it is not formated. Perhaps my computers SD slot can not exceed 2GB, or maybe a need new drivers...

HA!

Well, sure...but I think it would be easier to take the HD1 on a snowboard. ;-)

Of course, I don't know how to ski or snowboard, but I did climb about 30 feet of ladder with a 16mm camera a few months back and I'd have much rather gone up that shaky ladder with an SD1. I'm sure you'll find a million good uses for it. I wonder how long it will be until someone uses one of them for a crash cam?

Thank you very much for all the information! It's great to get the early word on such an interesting new product!

-Rob

I'm sure I will use it 10x more then my Z1, because it will be there! Finally a camera I can always take on vacation or just have with me in my jacket pocket. Now I just look forward to the MP4 H264 cameras... ;) After getting so much good info from this board I am glad I can post something of use.

Joseph,

Thanks for posting the samples. I assume the MPGs are in the high quality mode. I am also guessing you got a grey market camera - haven't seen them in US yet - but I guess that depends on where you are.

I have a few burning questions, if you don't mind.

1. Have you tried adjusting the color level and edge enhancement? If I read correctly, they should be adjustable. The color seems to be a bit much on all the samples I've seen.

2. What size filter ring? I hope!

3. Have you tried the clip cut and join features?

4. Any surprises?

Again, thanks for taking the time. At this stage, all info is appreciated.

Dave,

Yes highest quality video mode for all clips I posted.

I'm in the US and the camera came from Hong Kong.

I have really only tried the basics with the camera thus far.

1) I only see 4 selections. Normal, Vivid (more color), Soft (sharpness subdued), and Soft Vivid.

2) I am not sure. I'm want to know that myself. I will see if I can find out.

3) No.

4) Pretty much what I expected, except I was hoping the video quality would be a bit better that it is. The remote is much smaller then I expected ;)

I will see if I can post the instructions with a link.

--- Joseph

Instructions PDF:

www.gamersden.com/hd1test/Camera_GB.pdf

OK, I tried the clip cut and join features and they do work. It takes a little while to process though.

Pressing select on the "joystick" can be annoying as it is real easy to move the stick in a direction instead.

Yes, if the 19MB/s true H264 does comes through, it will be a good alternative to HDV, hopefully it might get rid of 80-90% of the attracting in motion. But cheap editing, like a $100 plug in editing card (maybe with the ambarella chip, HDMI and component in, and HDTV tuner).

Thanks for the clips.

Thanks, Joseph.

I dont like what i see on those videos, and i started to think this is no the same camera that shot the previous videos (baby and child).

In the first one i see some pixelating in solid colors, but not severe.
In these videos i can only see digital noise an very bad compression. Not HD to my eyes at all.

I'm the only one?

I like the fotos, sharp, the 5 mega shows.

I better wait before buy this camera. I'll see what the h264 cameras offer.

I agree my test videos do not seem to be the quality we saw in the baby/child videos that have been going around. Those videos where the reason I rushed to get this camera...

There is so much compression noise in the still areas of videos taken indoors, that it is distracting, but they do look sharp. The outdoor shots don't look noisy at all to me, but look blured, as if the resolution is not very high.

I'm sure the video tops anything you would get from a digital still camera though. It is a nice little vacation combo camera. I don't think a pro would be using it for a primary source of video for anything.

Thanks for your very early review, Joseph!

I also think the Sanyo is a nice all-in-one solution, but of cource not the pro HD cam some people were hoping for.
But lets be realistic - $799 is a fair price for a device which makes video clips much better than any DC cam <$1000 on the market and also take 5MP pics! In holiday I prefer having just carrying one device for all, and this will be the Sanyo when its available here. I think recording 9MBit 720p Mpeg4 will lead to very good mpeg2 DVDs (maybe with some postprocessing), probably much better than what is possible with normal DV cams.

Btw, you mentioned 4GB SD cards. According to the manual only 2GB are supported. More than 2GB are rarely supported, e.g. Win98 only supports 2GB for FAT16, and only since WinNT 4GB can be used with FAT16, or you have to use FAT32 which is not supported by all devices. Also not all card readers support 4GB! And FAT16 allows a max. filesize of 2GB!
Could you check if the 4GB card is playable in the cam, to be sure that the HD1 produces valid 4GB (probably in FAT16)?

I think that "blurry" look is compression at work. It's not fuzzy so much as kind of grainy and that looks more like compression than any kind of focus issue. I imagine that there's a "sweet spot" where the exposure at low ISO hits a point of minimum artifacting. It may be that the combination of sensor noise and artifacting is what causes the "blurry" thing to happen. You know, artifacted noise or whatever. The images seemed to exhibit much more compression artifacting than the footage with the baby and the ice cream kid, but there may be exposure and latitude issues. That first footage looked like it was taken on a relatively overcast day, which may have been working for it. Some tests under controlled lighting may tell more of the story, but it's way cool to have the early report here.

Frank,

I read somewhere that this camera would work with 4GB cards if they are formated as FAT 32, or at least some cards will work. So I desided to get the 4GB card and try it out. When I put the card in the camera it did show 58 minutes and 23 seconds of recording time left in HQ 720P mode. I recorded several clips and played them back on the camera just fine. I'm not able to read the SD card directly with my computer (Laptop SD slot with Windows XP), but if I hook the camera up to the USB port it works fine with the computer. Does that answer your question?

--- Joseph

Robert, I'm sure you are right that the blur is a product of the compression since the indoor shots can be quite sharp. Some parts of the video frame, such as bricks, show more blur then other parts. Now if I can figure out how to get a sharp shot without a ton of noise...

As soon as I have a chance, I will take indoor clips with proper lighting.

Thanks for the clarification. So actually the HD1 support 4Gb and FAT32, but not your Notebook CardReader. Maybe my Notebook will have the same problem, but as long as it works with the docking station thats fine :-)
4GB~1h is excactly my target, I wonder if I could mod the cam to get an A/V input, so it could become a stationary HDTV recorder, than 8GB would be even better ;-)

Joseph,

I read parts of the manual. Thanks again! It appears that the image adjustments are limited to the 4 options you mentioned. Could we maybe get a sample of the same shot with each of the options. The chroma level on the sample of the boy eating the ice cream cone. (not yours) seems to be more natural. Another thought - try under exposing just a little bit - or maybe using the ND filter. I wish they had a low-chroma setting in their selection.

Are there threads on the lens ring? I have seen a picture of the cam with a wide angle adapter installed, so there must be something. Nothing mentioned in the manual that I found.

Could you say a little about the software. VLC appears to be the only thing I have to play files, and I don't seem to have anything to convert the files to anything I find useful.

Thanks again! I guess you knew as an early adopter you would be hit hard.

David, I will take some controlled clips ASAP. I will take a shot with each image setting. All my previous clips used the normal setting, so the color should only get more extreme from there. I am sure you can mess with all the manual controls, but I am not very good in that area ;)

There are threads but I can not find the size anywhere. Yes, 2 optional lenses are going to be available. I have spent hours on the web and could not find the thread size...

I have not even check out the software yet. I have Vegas 6. I think there is a software manual I can post also.

--- Joseph