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My wife spent the Sunday trying out her new toy. I was pleasantly surprised by my wife's video shots since this is her first videocam and the videos look great. She took both indoors and outdoors shots (during the day) and output was clear and smooth. The video quality is definitely very good.
I shot some videos using super macro mode (that can go down to 1cm) on flowers and they look good and the auto focus picked the right subjects most of the time but in a few cases it focused on items in the near background. When closing in, you can see the focus changing and settling on the right subject. I tried the zoom but the result is shaky especially at the maximum end of the 10x optical zoom. This is the main weakness of the Sanyo, the unstable EIS. You'll need a tripod if you need to zoom with the Sanyo.
Color was very natural under normal daylight.
The built-in mic was very sensitive and the audio output was realistic and life-like with very little noise. During playback, I was transported back to the scene of the video.
When browsing at some of the forums, I saw a number of concerns on how the video will playback on TV because of the PAL/NTSC systems, the frame rates used and the different frequencies employed. Have no fear, I tried playback on both my analogue and digital TV and both were smooth with perfect audio sync. Of course, the quality of the videos depends on the quality of the TV used. I used the supplied S-AV cable to connect the Sanyo to my old CRT TV and the component cable to connect to my Sharp LCD TV. Also used a standard HDMI cable (not supplied) to connect the Sanyo to the Sharp LCD TV. BTW, all connections are via the docking station as shown below.
You have to set the TV Output options to suit the TV to be used for viewing.
Under TV System you can select NTSC or PAL, under TV Type you can select 4:3 or 16:9 format.
I tested using a CRT TV with 4:3 format under PAL to display the highest HD mode of 1920x1080 (60p) without any issues. You need to select the recording resolution if you use the component cable and using the HDMI is easier by just selecting auto and the output will match the recording mode used. My LCD TV is not full HD, just 1368x768 and so it can go to 1080i only but playback was no issue.
The problem is viewing on the PC. The video is recorded using MPEG4/H.264 (whatever that means) and not many media player can playback MPEG4 files. One of the software provided with the Sanyo is Nero Showtime 4 and I used this to view the videos. Those recorded at 1920x1080 (60i), the second highest resolution, playback without problem but those at the highest resolution of 1920x1080 (60p) was jerky on my desktop. I suspect that there's not enough RAM memory for this task since there is only 1G RAM. I will test again later when I increase the RAM. (Apple Quicktime showed only colour pixels!)
I tested using a CRT TV with 4:3 format under PAL to display the highest HD mode of 1920x1080 (60p) without any issues. You need to select the recording resolution if you use the component cable and using the HDMI is easier by just selecting auto and the output will match the recording mode used. My LCD TV is not full HD, just 1368x768 and so it can go to 1080i only but playback was no issue.
The problem is viewing on the PC. The video is recorded using MPEG4/H.264 (whatever that means) and not many media player can playback MPEG4 files. One of the software provided with the Sanyo is Nero Showtime 4 and I used this to view the videos. Those recorded at 1920x1080 (60i), the second highest resolution, playback without problem but those at the highest resolution of 1920x1080 (60p) was jerky on my desktop. I suspect that there's not enough RAM memory for this task since there is only 1G RAM. I will test again later when I increase the RAM. (Apple Quicktime showed only colour pixels!)
Playback on the Lenovo S10 (with the maximum 2G RAM) using Nero Showtime was even jerky for the lower resolution so using this netbook for viewing is out of the question. I will shoot some videos later at lower resolutions to see which is the highest that can be playback on the Lenovo S10. I suppose this is the price of quality, the typical PC just cannot handle this high resolution of the Sanyo. I suspect editing the videos will also be PC resource demanding as well. Will test this later as well.
Next I will get some blank DVD's and see if there is any issue burning the videos onto DVD. And finally test how the DVD will playback on a normal DVD player. So there are plenty of tasks to be perform. Sigh.
Ronald Kwok
