Images
High definition is so hot right now, you’ll need asbestos eyeballs to use this, the world’s first solid-state HD camcorder. The HD1 has a new organic LED (OLED) screen that’s meant to save power and have a super-wide viewing angle – although the muddy colours and flat contrast are probably unintentional.
The Xacti’s vertical, pistol-grip design is easy to hold and as easy to use. Despite a fiddly push-to-select joystick, the menus are perfect, with access to priority and manual exposure, focus modes, exposure zones and more.
The 10x lens is fast to zoom and focus, and serves up plenty of detail. You’ve a wide choice of video modes, from 60fps standard-definition VGA clips to 1280x720pixel, progressive scan HD movies.
Recording in memory-efficient MP4 squeezes half an hour of HD on the 2GB card supplied. Colours are strong, exposure is excellent and if the detail isn’t perfect, it’s about as good as MiniDV – without any upscaling worries for HD tellies.
It’s not as assured as Sony’s HC1 hi-def camcorder but that’s heavier, way more expensive and uses tape. Eugh. This is the future. Say hello with your wallet.
Tech Specs
- Dimensions
- 36x119x79 mm
- LCD Size
- 2.2
- Maximum frames per second
- 30
- Maximum movie resolution
- 1280x720
- Megapixels
- 5.3
- Memory card type
- SD
- Optical viewfinder
- No
- Optical zoom rating
- 10x
- Weight
- 210g
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Comments
Drunken Max
5 years ago
I've got the earlier (probably earliest) version of this. Don't you just hate being an "early adopter" sometimes? The camera shots are great, the video is pretty good as well but is useless in the dark. But get one. The beauty is, its about as handy as having a compact camera on you. The one thing you will do is shoot loads of video. No carrying an enourmous bag, setting up, swapping tapes etc. It is so convenient. So many people get a video camera and use four times during two weeks of the year. With this, you'll start having video that you throw away (delete from the card) becasue you have enough already. Another great thing is that you can join clips on the camera and trim scenes. I wish I'd got the HD one though.