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Apparently she has told my elder daughter who has a friend whose father owns a camera shop and the friend has recommended the latest Sanyo Xacti videocam, the VPC HD2000. She told my daughter that this is a craze in Hong Kong and she will give us a good offer when she has her warehouse sale later in the month. (Maybe her company is the distributor for Sanyo stuff!) This model is apparently the only consumer videocam that has progressive HD recording currently. (The stuff that says 1080p instead of 1080i which is supposed to be twice as good!) Since my daughter is always looking for the best, she convinced my wife that this is the videocam to buy.
I know Sanyo make fridges and other electrical goods but don't remember them selling any cameras, let alone videocams. Of course I was very skeptical about this and I went around looking at the camera shops. All the videocams I saw were Canons, Sonys, Panasonics, JVC or even Samsungs but no Sanyos and finally I found only one shop selling this model. So I googled and was presently surprised that Sanyo do make videocams and this model is getting some good reviews as well.
This is an unconventional shape, very much like a slightly oversized shaver or a mini hair dryer. They call this the pistol grip since you will aim and shoot your video just like you aim and shoot with a pistol. Sanyo has been producing this style of videocam for a number of years but this is their first progressive HD model which replaces the earlier HD1000 and the HD1010 which came out late last year.
This post will be purely on my point of view as a user and not on the technical aspects. The most complete review so far for the HD2000 is to be found at the camcorder info site here and my post will mainly cover items not touched by this review plus my views on the items covered as an end-user. Since this is my first videocam, I have no previous experience or videocam to compare with and my comments may be very subjective.
To cut this intro short, I went ahead and bought the Sanyo VPC HD2000 as an advanced birthday present for my wife last weekend so that she can get some practice using it before our holiday in Turkey later in May (if the swine flu has not stopped the world by then.) Below is a shot of my latest desktop with the unholy trinity of Lenovo S10 netbook, Sharp HD (ready) LCD TV and the latest Sanyo HD videocam as each has its own Blog. Will they work together? I'll soon find out. You can see their relative sizes in this shot; the Sanyo videocam is sitting in the docking station.
Actually, the trio are only together for the shots since only the Sharp LCD TV is mine that belongs to my desktop; the Lenovo S10 and the Sanyo videocam belong to my wife but I will be borrowing them from time to time for testing and writing this and other Blogs. I use a Dell Inspiron for my normal work.
I decided to buy the Sanyo because of some good reviews that I have read. Though it is not the best in the market, it is good value for money with the features that it has. Sure, you can get better videocam but at a much higher price. Actually the main reason is that my wife has more or less made up her mind on this model so if I get her anything else she would not be happy inside. Thus to keep her happy so that she will not make me unhappy, I took this model. Ladies sure have their way around, sigh.
Anyway, stay tuned.
Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok
