Camcorder breakthrough - Sanyo Xacti VPC HD700 Review
I dont have to tell regular readers here about how fast technology is advancing especially when it comes to consumer electronics, but many may be taken by surprise when they look at how far camcorders have moved on recently. Just look at the Sanyo Xacti VPC HD700 as an example.
Of course the image gathering is one area that has improved enormously and so the HD700 boasts high definition 720p resolution at 30 frames per second. But the real breakthrough of late is the storage medium. Camcorders have been using tapes, hard drives and writable DVDs of various sizes for the last few years, but these media have problems with robustness and size that has limited the camcorder. Flash memory is the obvious solution but until recently it was limited by capacity and speed, not any longer. SD cards holding one or two gigibytes have now been displaced by a higher capacity SDHC upgrade which go up to 32 GB, easily enough for camcorder HD storage. SDHC has the same small form factor as the SD version.
I have been trying out the HD700 which by the way comes in silver or red colours (I got the red). It is a handy compact size with an LCD screen that folds away for storage and includes a 5x optical zoom. The picture quality is excellent given the price of this device (currently £265). I used an 8 GB SD card and have found that adequate provided I take my laptop on holiday so that I can regularly copy off the video. I had been worried that the SDHC format would not work in the SD slot of the Vaio but that did not turn out to be a problem. Using the slot makes copying the files easy since no USB cable is needed.
The files on the card are stored in an MP4 video format that does not play on windows media player, but it will play on Apply Quicktime. Alternatively you can get a free utility such as WinFF to play of convert the files.