Trigger happy TV

I HAVE LONG drooled over the Sanyo Xacti line since first seeing them at CES three years ago.  When they came out with the HD1 and then HD1000, I knew I had to try them first hand.  For the last few months, I have been playing with a Sanyo Xacti HD1000, and gone over it thoroughly in my daily use.

I used it, probed it, and generally abused it as I flew around the world going from trade show to convention hall to rock concert. Once you wrap your brain around a few quirks, it did really well, with some problems and a few warts that were mostly avoidable.

What originally caught my eye was the pistol grip design with a flip out screen. If you are right handed, the ergonomics looked to be done right, pun intended. Picking it up felt good at first, and after months of use, it still feels good. That is the long-handed way of saying it feels as good as it looks, and since you don't have to bend your hand at odd angles like most camcorders, your wrist doesn't ache after using it for a bit.

The first test of any device like this is whether or not you can open the box, pick it up, and just start using it. Can you find the main functions with not much more than a glance? If you are thinking that a function should work like X, does it? With the Xacti HD1000, the short answer is yes, it does for the most part.

The main functions that I use, picture, movie, zoom and flash all fall right under your thumb. The two main functions, record a movie and take a picture are dead center and easy to press. Each is colored differently, so you never hit the wrong one. My only quibble is that this would probably been better done as a trigger instead of a thumb button, but the way it is works quite well. Zoom is a slider just to the left of that, once again exactly where I thought it would be. To the right is the record/playback switch, with the full auto button on the top. Below is the menu buttom, and a programmable 4-way hat switch below that. The only other controls on the camcorder is the on/off button hidden under the screen, and a flash pop-up button. The layout doesn't take much to learn.

How does it work? Quite well, once you give up on doing anything manually and just use the auto mode. The first week of playing with it was an exercise in frustration, trying to get lighting, white balance, focus and every other setting done well enough to get a clear shot. I just couldn't do it, everything came out blurry and grainy, with 1 of 10 shots working out.

Because all the settings are mostly buried in a menu, I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to use the damn thing right. A minute of fiddling, followed by a shot that doesn't work, followed by a bit more fiddling is not the way to use a camera, especially if you need to take hundreds of shots a day at a trade show.

I was about to give up when I came to the startling conclusion that you didn't need to do all of that. If you just hit the Full Auto button, the magic elves that Sanyo put inside the Xacti HD1000 go to work for you instead of trying to blur your picture at the last minute. Damn elves. Full Auto works really well, and from that point on, I went from serious doubt to liking the camcorder a lot.

The pictures are sharp, the movies look really good at the 1080i setting, and the microphone on the back of the screen exceeded my expectations. With this mental hurdle overcome, the Xacti became a useful tool, and several of the events I wrote up over the last few months had pictures taken with it. Don't blame the device for my lack of camera skills though. Taking still shots at a trade show of slow moving USB dongles and even slower moving executives under a spotlight is one thing that most cameras can do well.

It takes a little more extreme conditions to cause modern devices to screw up, so that is just what I tried to do at Austin City Limits. 

The pictures above were taken from a very shaky stand above the stage at above the AMD Stage at Austin City Limits in late September during the John Fogerty concert. The stage was shaking pretty badly, there were spotlights blinking on and off, the crowd goes from very shaded to bright lights, people are moving all over, and there is a ton of dust in the air. The original shot is 2288 * 1712 pixels, ~4MP resolution, shrunk down for perspective.

The lower picture is a crop out of the center. I wasn't expecting nearly the detail I got, and was pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. The other cameras I brought along, small point and shoot models fell over with far less challenging circumstances, so they were left at the hotel after day one.

One thing that makes the Xacti HD1000 such a nice still camera is that it has a 10x optical zoom. The body is shaped so you can get a large range of lens travel, unlike the 'normal' flat cameras. I like it a lot, but it won't match a decent SLR with a real set of lenses. That is not to say that there are not some warts, there are, a few of them serious, but most are at the level of quirks.

The most serious one is dealing with Full Auto mode. You have to manually set it to Full Auto every time the Xacti turns on or wakes up. By default, it goes to sleep after one minute, and wakes up in a very impressive three seconds. You can set the sleep timer longer of course, but you pay for that in battery life.

When it wakes up, auto is off, and you have to remember to press it or manually focus your camera. Should you forget, you end up with a raft of blurry pictures, the resolution of the screen is not high enough to notice what you have done in real time, it looks OK there. Sanyo really needs to allow the Full Auto mode to survive sleep or power, all the other settings do, why not this? It makes no sense.

Another quirk is the resolution of Full Auto, it sets still shots to 4MP. Please note, I didn't say by default, they are at 4MP period. The camcorder can take still shots at up to 8MP, but if you want the auto mode, you are going to use 4MP thank you very much. Given that a sub-$30 4G SDHC card will hold well over 2000 4MP shots, space isn't a concern, so the higher the better really, but the lack of 8MP was annoying. What it comes down to is that the lack of Full Auto effectively limits this to a 4MP camera with 8MP limited to a few select and slow moving circumstances.

The last quirk is that the flash is a very nice design, tucked away nicely until needed, but it hides a dark side. When you don't need it, it isn't there, but when you do need it, it isn't there, the flash won't automatically pop up. It is spring loaded, so it is simply a matter of opening a latch. In the end, I just left it open whenever I was at a show, mostly defeating the purpose of hiding it in the first place.

Last up is focus time which is a tad slow. It is not deadly slow, but there are times when it seems to take longer than it should. This isn't a big deal for pictures, it just slows you down a little, and I mean a little when you are taking shots. It is more of a problem with fast moving objects, trying to snap a series of stills of a fast moving car driving by you is almost a lost cause, but a runner isn't much of a problem.

Other than those issues, the Xacti HD1000 makes a much better still camera than most the ergonomics are great, and the resulting shots are solid as well. During months of sometimes very heavy use, I never ran out of battery, I always ran out of memory cards or things to take pictures of first. Movies had a different set of quirks altogether, and they were a lot less serious than the still pictures.

The biggest problem was in the highest rez mode, called Full HD, 1920 x 1080 at 60FPS, and was likely due to an underpowered DSP. The movies came out pretty well, some of them looked fabulous, especially when the camera didn't move much. The problem itself became clear when you started shooting in lower resolutions, 1280 x 720 at 30FPS or lower.

At the lower resolutions, the camera seemed to focus quicker, so panning and zooming worked much better. At the top rezzes, there was much more blurring and interlacing visible on quick transitions. In the ACL scenes above, when you went from a crowd shot to the musicians on stage to focusing on an item like a pedal on the stage, the Xacti worked much better when in lower resolutions.

Also in the highest rez, when panning fast, there was some obvious interlace related artifacting at the edges of the frame. For every step of resolution you lowered the image, the better things worked. It didn't register with me what the problem was until I was trying to see what the highest resolution I could film an entire event in with a 4G memory card. The top three image settings, 1920 x 1280 x 60, 1280 x 720 x 60 and 1280 x 720 x 30 all showed almost the same recording time. when they should have been markedly different. This is almost assuredly because the poor little overworked DSP in the HD1000 is at the limit at 1280 x 720 x 60, and cranking things up from there went beyond it's limits. The bit rates, and thus the recording times capped out at that point.

When you pushed it yet higher, the DSP had to devote less time to other things like focus and keeping the magic elves stabilising the image happy. In the highest rez mode, you are limited to fairly slow-moving camera work with few focus changes. Mount this on a tripod, and 1080p here we come.

Chasing after troops during urban warfare, or worse yet an outdoor concert in Texas, and things get a little iffy. Drop the rez a bit, and things just work. Since I got the HD1000, Sanyo has released a minor update to it, the HD1010. This appears to be the same body with a beefed up DSP and image sensor, and it likely addresses all the problems that I had with the HD1000. If I am able to play with one at CES, I will report back on the issue.

In a really bright design move, Sanyo put the microphone on the back of the screen. It works really well, picking out voices quite well in noisy environments like, say above the stage at a rock concert. On the other end of the spectrum, it would pick out whispers from the camera person when taking wildlife shots, even with a flock of annoyed birds screeching in the background. Absolutely no complaints about the microphone, but there is a 1/8" jack should you want a better one.

Overall, as a movie camera, the HD1000 is solid, but didn't quite live up to it's HD billing. If you disregard the 1080i/p billing and think of it as a solid 720p unit, it won't disappoint. The same great ergonomics that helped it out as a still camera only make things easier as a video unit. No tired wrists after a day of use, and all the movies I took came out from decently to damn well. For computer users with carpal tunnel problems this seems to be the camera to use.

One often overlooked but important piece of digital camcorders is the software and accessory hardware. The Xacti HD1000 does OK on the software, but with two minor points, the accessories are a hair away from great. The accessories are a dock and enough cables to connect to anything under the sun. It comes with USB, video, S-video, microphone (1/8" to 1/8") adapter and a USB to mini-USB cable. It also has a charging/file transfer dock that makes life a lot easier. There is even an HDMI out on the back of the dock for directly connection to an HDTV.

Cables are cables, but the dock is a mixed bag because of how the software works. If you only use the dock as a charger and stand, it works very well. It is in the USB drive, PC camera, and printing functions where the few ergonomic gaffes show up. When you plug the HD1000 in to the base, it offers you a choice of connecting to a printer or computer. Lacking a suitable printer, I always chose the computer option.

Then you are presented with a menu to allow the Xacti to act as a USB memory stick, webcam, or a fully DRM infected device. The navigation is with the hat switch on the back of the unit. This is where you run into the first problem. The dock is designed to sit in one direction, with the on/off button facing you, the cables out the back, and the lens in your face. In webcam mode, this makes a lot of sense. When you dock it however, even with the screen rotated 180 degrees, the controls that you must use to pick your mode are on the other side. If you point it the other way, you have to go around the back for the on/off button, but you can't use it as a webcam, and in general, it looks ugly.

This is an ergonomic screwup that mainly stands out because the rest of the package is so good. A redesigned dock, along with a PC driver that pops up a window allowing you to make these choices on the computer are badly needed.

That brings us to the software end of things. The software choices are a bunch of 'lite' version of programs that do the basics, but not much more. Included are Nero 7 Essentials, Ulead MovieFactory 5 SE, Quicktime and the DRM infected Itunes, Acrobat reader and Xacti Screen Capture 1.1. They allow you to do the basics, grab movies, cut and paste them, and burn a disk, but not much more.

Some people reported trouble using Quicktime and the highest 1080i/p rez movies from the HD1000, you will find references to a green screen in many places. Apple, in the thoughtful way they always do things, changed Quicktime so it broke the format the Xacti records in. Using an older version of QT, it works fine, but the newer ones break things. There is no explanation why other than Apple's attitude problem. The easy solution is not to use Quicktime, something I heartily recommend anyway.

Both Ulead and Cyberlink PowerDirector worked just fine with the movies from the HD1000, and FFDShow and MediaPlayer Classic played back movies without a problem. I didn't encounter any mainstream package that didn't like the format other than Windows Media Player, but once again, avoid that DRM and malware infested nightmare as well.

The software that comes with it is not without some problems as well. Had I done the normal frightened consumer thing and installed the software fully and properly before I turned things on, I likely would have thrown the unit out of the window, and returned it in pieces. Why? Stupidity from Corel/Ulead and Kodak.

The Ulead software comes with a serial number, that asks you to go on to the web, plug the serial number in, and get another number back to register with. To do this you need to give them your information and email. If it wasn't for the fact that I needed it to complete a review, I would have told them to bite me, returned the unit, and wrote a letter to Sanyo.

The other one is that EVERY TIME you put the disc in, it pops up an installer menu. Fair enough, but when you close it, you get a wonderful popup with a 'special offer' from Kodak. Rather than feeling grateful, the choices of 'yes' or 'no, but we will put an icon on your desktop to remind you' just aggravated me. Once again, WTF? Did Sanyo really need to spam us with low grade advertising for morons? It saddens me and left a really bad taste in my mouth, not to mention having to clean up that damnable ad about 10 times.

The only software function lacking in the end was the most obvious, a way to sync with a PC. This is not all that big or unusual a request, just the ability to do something as obvious and radical as pressing a button and getting the files dumped onto to your PC, maybe with a little preview app. Sadly this is not the case, you have to manually set it to USB drive mode, then grab the files by hand.

In the end it is simply easier to not plug the USB cable into the dock, and just use it as a stand and charger, the rest of it isn't worth the hassle. Pull out the SD card, slap it into your PC, and off you go with a lot more speed and less frustration.

The last bit is all good, the manual. It is a tome of about 200 pages, with an additional easy install guide. In this time of leaflets posing as help, it is quite welcome. There was no index, but section names printed on each page made it almost a moot point. Well done here.

While it may sound like I am dwelling on the negatives, overall, the positives greatly outweigh the them. If you look at the Xacti HD1000 as a solid still camera and 720p++ camcorder, you will do quite well.

The great shape and ease of use outweigh any negatives, and the workarounds for the quirks soon become second nature. Battery life is good, and it never let me down in about six months of heavy use. This isn't to say that it can't be improved, and likely was with the HD1010.

Some fairly minor changes would add a lot of goodness to this camcorder, and take it from good to great. With the HD1000 currently selling for sub-$500 and the HD1010 at under $600, they are pretty good deals, and nothing that lines up against it has anything like the ergonomics.

As my time with the HD1000 grows to a close, the sub-$600 question is, would I buy one? Both my girlfriend and I came to the same conclusion without much arguing, yes. The size, convenience, and nebulous 'goodness' factor won us over. If the next gen that is inevitably coming out at CES doesn't advance the state of the art measurably, I will pick up an HD1010 myself.

If you are in the market for a light duty HD/still camera, check the Sanyos out. µ