Sanyo wows the crowds with its Xacti camera range
The Sanyo Xacti camcorder range welcomes five new colourful members to the compact video capturing team today. And much like the seven dwarfs, the new camcorders have equally descriptive nicknames (that have been totally made up) – Slim, Watertight, Waterproof and Horizontal and the very cool HD. But which one is which? Let’s take a look.
Headlining the new additions with their full HD goodness, it’s the HD2000 and FH1 (that’d be HD and Horizontal). Both sport 8 megapixel sensors to capture snaps, which equates to 5.31 megapixels for video capture. And if you’re the wildlife (or people) watching type, you’ll be happy to know they’ve both got 10x optical zoom and an ISO range of 50-3200 that’ll guarantee great results at all lighting levels. Both cameras provide high speed recording of up to 600fps (for those Baywatch shots) and pack a Reverse Sequential Shot function, which as Dan puts it, “sounds like playing everything backwards to me”.
Now what separates the two is 8GB of internal storage. The FH1’s the one with the storage space, and it will gather all your HD recordings, encoded at 24MBps when an SD/HDSD card isn’t accessible.
Next up, it’s the 720p capturing DMX-CA9 and DMX-WH1 (Watertight and Waterproof), which (is clear from the monikers) are both waterproof camcorders. However it’s the WH1 that really stands out for me. Even before its specs are revealed, the WH1 just looks like a great camcorder option. It comes in a neon-tastic shade of yellow for crying out loud – what’s not to love? The WH1 also has better waterproof superpowers and can be submerged deeper than the other at 3m, while the CA9 can go in up to 1.5m. They’re great for the water baby in you. Onboard memory isn’t as impressive at 43GB, but the option to expand to 32GB is there. What is impressive however, is the zooms on these bad boys – well on one of them anyway. While the CA9 packs a mediocre 5x optical zoom, the WH1 gets all the close up goodness, 30x of goodness.
Last up, its Slim, also known as DMX-CG10. It’s got the same sensor as the HD2000 and FH1, however what makes it stand out from the crowd (when the neon WH1 isn’t around) is its slim and lightweight body (171g), making it 2.5 percent slimmer and 10 percent lighter than its predecessor, the HD800.
All cameras are supposedly US bound, but considering Xacti is holding a press conference in London tonight, we could be seeing them over here too. We’ll let you know and bring you more pics (and possibly some footage) soon.
Sanyo
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