Sanyo's High-End Camcorder Boxes You In

Sometimes things just don't work out the way they're supposed to.

Take, for example, this review of Sanyo's(SANYY Quote) Xacti HD 1000 digital movie camera. I brought it along with me to test under real working conditions -- at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, last month.

The idea was that my producer-cinematographer Dee Robinson would shoot me with his professional Panasonic camera (with a Leica lens) -- and I would shoot him shooting me using the Sanyo HD1000. Both of us would shoot in full HD. In the Sanyo's case, that means 1920 by 1080 pixels. The Panasonic was also set at full 1080i. The plan was for Dee to edit everything together when we got home.

Notice I wrote that in the past tense.

That's because we couldn't edit anything together. Actually, we couldn't even see the Sanyo's video on any of our Apple(AAPL Quote) Mac or Windows computers.

First, let me tell you a little about the camera.

The VPC-HD1000 is the top of Sanyo's compact video camcorder line. The ergonomically designed device is small and comfortably fits in you hand.

It has a F1.8 lens with a 10x optical zoom. A digital zoom feature increases that to a maximum of 100x. The flip-open LCD color screen measures a whopping 2.7 inches (diagonally). The rechargeable battery is supposedly good for up to two full hours of recording at full HD.

The camera is fully automatic -- set it and forget it. Or, if you wish, you can use it in a full manual mode and set everything to your liking.

As I mentioned, the HD1000 is capable of recording in full MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, 1920 by 1080i, high-definition mode. It also does stills up to 3264 by 2448 pixels. Audio is recorded at 48 KHz, 16-bit AAC format. It needs a SD HC card to record everything. We used an 8GB Kingston for our tests.

The camera is meant to be plugged into its little docking station for charging and also for attaching to a TV or computer monitor. You can use an S-video AV cable (supplied) or an HDMI cable (what Sanyo calls a "recommended accessory," which means it doesn't come in the box).

The HD1000 needs your HD television monitor to show your full-HD videos. On a big TV screen, using an HDMI connection, the Sanyo is capable of producing pretty good quality videos. As you might expect, they look a little less good using the S-video cable.

But we learned the hard way that these videos are only viewable through the camera on an HDTV. When we copied the HD video files to our Mac editing system we couldn't see anything except a solid green screen. We could hear some audio though. We had the same thing happen on our Windows (XP and Vista) computers.

When we questioned the Sanyo help desk, they first told us that Apple didn't support this type of MPEG-4 video file in Final Cut Pro. But when we asked them why they weren't viewable in Windows, we were told that both Apple and Microsoft operating systems would have to catch up with 1080i technology. She told us that it said this on the camera box.

I was suspicious, too. The only thing it says on the box is "1080i video not compatible with QuickTime Version 7.2". Nothing about the latest version, 7.4.

But its excuse doesn't really hold water.

Sanyo provides a software DVD with the camera. It contains editing/viewing programs for Windows computers as well as QuickTime 7.1. One might think that Sanyo would provide the end user with the proper software to view HD files on a computer. Maybe not in 1080i, but in 720i, which computers can handle. Or even 480i.