If you're familiar with Sanyo's previous palm-size Xacti camcorders, such as the VPC-C5 or VPC-C6, the VPC-HD1 will feel like an old friend. Still, the HD1 is an important technical milestone, even if it has some limitations. But once you factor in its slow focus and overly high-contrast, artifact-ridden photos and videos, that glass begins to look emptier by the minute. Macworld editor Roman Loyola also tested the VPC-WH1’s underwater chops in a swimming pool, and found the camcorder’s shallow-water performance to be very good, with a couple of caveats: The LCD is hard to see underwater, and during playback the footage shot underwater doesn’t look much better than standard-definition video.If you're a glass-half-full kind of person, it may be enough that the 5-megapixel Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1's feature list contains several first-to-market wins: it records and outputs progressive-scan video at 720p, it incorporates a dazzling 2.2-inch OLED screen, and it crams a 10X zoom lens into a device that fits into your palm. My informal tests in a pool, under sprinklers, and at an ocean beach confirmed Sanyo’s claims. Sanyo says that beneath 10 feet of water, the VPC-WH1 will remain waterproof and functional for 1 hour. The camcorder’s low price and waterproof construction at least partially offset its drawbacks. But some editing applications may require a time-consuming conversion of the MP4 files to another format before you can start working with the footage. The bundled TotalMedia Extreme for Sanyo software works well with files from the VPC-WH1, as you would expect. In PC World Test Center battery evaluations, the VPC-WH1 lasted more than 3 hours on a single charge of its battery–more than twice as long as some competitors–earning a battery-life score of Superior.Īlthough the VPC-WH1 does not record video to the increasingly common AVCHD format, the camera’s MPEG-4 video files use the same codecs (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 for video, and AAC for audio) as standard AVCHD does. On the upside, the camera is easy to use, the 30X-optical-zoom lens works well, the camera records to inexpensive SDHC cards, and the battery runs significantly longer than those in many other small HD camcorders. Costlier camcorders provide more automatic and manual control, as well, and offer broader frame-rate and data-rate options. The 2.5-inch LCD panel is also nowhere near as bright or sharp as the screens of better camcorders. The electronic image-stabilization system doesn’t remove user-induced shake as effectively as the optical or dual-stabilized systems in more-expensive camcorders do. And the sensor isn’t the only compromise in the VPC-WH1. That’s the kind of image quality you might expect from a camcorder with a single, tiny 1/6-inch CMOS sensor, though. Still images didn’t fare even as well as that, showing distortion and a lack of sharpness for stills, as a result, the VPC-WH1 received an image-quality score of Poor. Among our test group of six camcorder models, its video quality under both bright light and low light trailed the rest of pack, earning an overall video-quality score of Fair. Results from the PC World Test Center’s jury evaluations confirmed the VPC-WH1’s video and still-image shortcomings in comparison with more-expensive, higher-resolution camcorders.
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