Sanyo VPCFH1 HD 1080p Flash Memory Camcorder w/

Great HD Camcorder @ This Price
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
In both of the videos below, I was pouring water into a cup to watch in slow motion. You can only record 10 seconds in either slow motion choice (240/600 FPS). At 600 FPS for 10 seconds, it plays back for about 90 seconds. I shot this at my desk with only the ceiling light.

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I agree with just about everything the other positive reviewers have said. I just am not happy with the video quality @ 600 FPS. I don’t see myself using it frequently, so it’s not that big of a deal to me. It could use a microphone input like it’s gun handle sister camcorder has.

I should also note that the unit comes with a string to keep the lens cap attached to the camcorder and not become lost. Yes I know manual lens caps are a pain, but I just wanted to point out that it does attach to the camera and you won’t lose it. Due to some of the other reviews, that was a big concern of mine prior to purchase.

I am happy with the camcorder and would highly recommend it.

Good Value for money but read on
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I am going to touch upon things that have not been already discussed by other reviewers.

Before you buy this camera, things you need to consider.

1) Will you be shooting in the full HD mode at the maximum frame rate or at 30 fps.

2) Will you be shooting in the 720 p mode OR the regular SD mode.

3) Will you be editing the videos or just saving the files as is ?

4) Where will you playback the videos. Computer, DVD player, Blueray Player etc. ?

The camera outputs the video in h.264 MPEG4 format. Now if you are playing directly from camera to TV, you are good to go. But if you want to download and play on the computer, you will need to install video lan (Vlan)player. I found this player to be really good. Or you can used the Nero which comes in the CD.

The performance of the computer is supreme in playing/editing HD feed. At minimum a dual core processor, a good fast video card and at-least 2 GB of RAM will be required to play back even the 720p format without freezing or being choppy. I am speaking of PC’s. I have no experience with MACS. So if you don’t have a good fast PC, avoid this camera for the time being.

Editing the h.264 files is another story in itself. The supplied nero will be able to do basic editing but if you are looking at a movie maker like functionality, then it will not work. There is a work around though…. to import the h.264 into windows moviemaker. To do so, first install the k-lite basic codec pack. Now you will be able to import into windows movie maker and edit. Again you will need a high end computer to edit or you will experience freezing and lagging. After you import the files into the movie maker and see horizontal lines in the video, click on the ffdshow video decoder icon(blue icon) on your task-bar and check the “De-interlace” option. Now the files can be editing in a regular fashion and published as WMV HD files. Or use a HD movie maker like the Sony Vegas Platinum. Costs about $80.

Storage media :

Make sure you get a class 6 SD card for optimal read/write speeds. One important thing to note. The file system on the SD card is FAT. The maximum permissible file size is 4GB. Once you hit the 4GB mark while recording, the camera will start recording a new file. But the issue is between finishing up the writing in the old file and starting the new file, there will be a lag, about 6 to 8 seconds on a class 4 SD and 3 to 4 sec on a class 6. So get a class six. At any rate you are bound to lose about few seconds after the recording reaches the 4GB mark..Just FYI if you are shooting a game or a play or something continuous.

Auto focus:

For indoor shooting try using the manual focus. In the auto focus mode, in low light conditions, the camera, sometimes will not distinguish between the foreground and the background, and the focus will sometimes, keep going in and out resulting in soft or blurry pictures on occasion. While using the manual focus, using the pan or zoom feature will throw the focus off… To the human eye, what might look like perfectly good lighting may be low light conditions for the camera sensor.

Cant think of anything else but the summary is; this is a good camera for under 500, if you have a good fast computer for editing and playback and you know the shortcomings, which are few but definitely worth remembering.

Quick, inexpensive path to 1080p video capture
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I purchased the Sanyo VPC-FH1 for a trip to New Zealand and Australia.

Everything worked to near-perfection. I made over 80 gig of HD recordings, which I now have to edit down to presentable programs.

Here’s the setup I used:

I bought two 32gig SD cards (adata SDHC class 6) and two “unknown brand” replacement batteries. Have you heard of “Wasabi” batteries? I hadn’t, but the batteries worked acceptably, in addition to the Sanyo battery that came with the camcorder. I also bought a stand-alone battery charger (I forget the model and brand). It came with an all voltage power supply.

I used a Manfrotto monopod (676b) and Manfrotto micro ball head (482). A thread adapter is needed to attach these two items together, but it can stay inside the ball head. This monopod assembly is very light weight and fits inside my overnight bag with the ball head removed. I recommend the “3 clamp” 676b monopod over the “4 clamp” model that collapses to a shorter length. The 676B is sturdier in use, even with the trifling weight of this ball head and camera.

I own a USB multiformat flash memory reader/writer that plugs into my Dell XPS 1330 laptop, so I never attached the camera directly to the laptop. I just removed the SD cards from the camera and plugged them into the reader. The laptop was light enough that I never regretted having it.

I never came close to filling up one of the SD cards in one day, even though I recorded at 1080p most of the time. I used a second battery frequently, which was no real inconvenience. I averaged about two and half hour’s worth of video in a day or less.

I downloaded each day’s video to my laptop via the card reader and put the other (empty) SD card into camcorder.

If needed, I could edit the files quickly with Nero 9 Ultimate (Nero Vision module). I used this program to create some quick edited 720p programs, plus some PAL DVDs of the recordings for my friends in New Zealand. I’ll use it at home to make the final edited programs.

Sanyo VPC-FH1 Picture quality:

I can’t say the image quality matches that of more expensive cameras (maybe yes, maybe no), but I strongly doubt any camera at this price is any better. Low motion scenes in good light look terrific. With more movement and lower light, the picture degrades, but never horribly. Strong backlighting would make the foreground subject a dark shape.

For perspective about quaity, I played the raw files on a large LCD panel, using Nero Showtime and the HDMI connection from my laptop. I was pleased. Anyone else that saw the videos thought the results were much, much better than any other camcorder videos they had previously seen. Everyone asked how much it cost. Most agreed that the circa $450 cost was more than fair. Most were more impressed by the small size, commenting that this camera was small enough for anyone to tote around and use.

Likes:

Very light

Small

Closing the LCD flap forces standby

Adequate low light performance

Easy to hold and use

Real button controls–After having used a “touch screen” Sony camcorder in the lo-rez past, I much prefer the real buttons and clean LCD of the Sanyo approach.

Dislikes:

Lens cap noise–the remove cap/attach cap process annoys some people, but it doesn’t bother me. However, the cap makes distracting clicks and clacks against the monopod while hanging on its tether if you forget to stow it in “slot” in the back of the handstrap provided for this purpose.

Also, you have to attach the tether when first prepping the camera. This is relatively easy, but I see many people skipping this step and soon losing the lens cap. This would be very bad, as the lens is not well shielded from errant fingers.

Lens flare: Shooting anywhere near the sun causes obvious flares. I’m going to look for an after market lens shade to mitigate this problem. I presume this is no worse than other camcorders with fast, multielement lenes, but I can’t be sure.

Card Read Failure: After about 22 days of use, the camera reported that one of my SD cards was unreadable and asked to format it. But when I pressed “yes” to the “format card?” prompt, the format failed. After repeated insert/remove cycles (about four), the camera reported the card was fine and had no more problems that day or later.

I don’t yet know if this problem will persist. If it does, it might be a fault in the specific Adata SD card (I hope it is) or a defect in the camera’s internal card reader/writer (sigh).

**update**The Adata cards were the problem. Any other flash memory works fine. Avoid the 32gig Adata cards. The contact quality is unacceptable.

I am quite happy with the purchase of the Sanyo VPC-FH1.

Not bad for the price.
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I recently bought this camera based on the review of the pistol grip version of same camera at camcorderinfo dot com.

Cons:

-no external mike input (the pistol grip version has it, but I dislike pistol grip cameras).

-no viewfinder, but I knew that. A viewfinder helps the user steady the camera and this camera needs all the steadying help it can get.

-the electronic image stabilizer is ‘jerky’. This is a very lightweight camera and the 16X optical zoom is useless for handheld work because the EIS is not that good. OIS on other, more expensive cameras is better. I attached a monopod to help stabilize it, just to add weight.

-lacks 720/60p

-flimsy plastic construction.

-the manual focus control is dum. A focus ring would have been much better.

-auto focus keeps shifting between background and foreground, sometimes it wanders.

Pros:

-finally get rid of tapes!!!!

-edit videos on the fly, just cut and join, but it’s enough.

-good in low light.

-1080/60p with decent image quality for the price.

-great for non-linear editing

-speedy menu navigation with the mini-joystick – think I like that more than my old Sony touchscreen. But I hope the joystick doesn’t break.

-lots of manual controls.

Summary:

As a Sony and Canon camcorder fan, it was a big step to go to Sanyo. But the other guys just can’t find it in their hearts to make a consumer camera with 1080/60p. Screw interlace! I shoot a lot of sports and only progressive will do for slow-mo and on this matter Sanyo has delivered. It’s not bad for the price. I wish it felt more robust like my old all-metal Sony camcorder. I don’t think this camera will survive a fall. Anyway I think I’ll have fun with it for now. But if something like it comes along with OIS, a metal body and an viewfinder, my Sanyo will become a back-up camera.

It takes photos too, but that doesn’t interest me.

Which Laptop or software to display 1080P 60FPS videos ?
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I thought of sharing with others my findings on which laptop and software can properly display videos shot at 1080P with 60FPS – which I believe is or should be the main reason to buy this great camera. Below are the laptops I’ve tested – with their corresponding naming convention to facilitate this review. I’m putting specs where needed otherwise you should be able to find those in the internet.

HP D: DV7-2185DX, Q9000, 6GB Ram, 17.3” 1600×900

COMPAQ: F730US, 1GB Ram, 15.4” 1200×800

ASUS: G71GX-A1, Q9000, 6GB Ram, 17” 1900×1200

GATEWAY: P-7809u, P8700 2.53Ghz, Nvidia 9800M GTS with 1GB, 1440×900

SONY Z: VGNZ790DLX, P8800, 256MB Nvidia 9300M GS

SONY F: FW490, 2.8Ghz, 1900×1080, 4GB Ram, 1GB ATI 6450

SONY A: AW390, 2.1Ghz, 1900×1080, 4GB Ram, 512MB Nvidia 9600M GT

My sample video is shot at 1080P, 60FPS and it’s 250MB. It’s not an action movie although I was walking fast while shooting it with some background sound. Below are the softwares I’ve tested in all of the above laptops.

CYBERLINK: Cyberlink PowerDVD 9

SPLASHLITE

And below are additional softwares I’ve tested on Compaq, my own personal – and rather out of date – laptop.

VLC: VLC media player

MPC: Media player classic with CoreAVC

ARCSOFT: ArcSoft media theatre

First, let me share the good news, i.e. combinations of laptop+software that display the video flawlessly:

ASUS+CYBERLINK (best picture quality)

SONY Z+SPLASHLITE (didn’t try Cyberlink)

HP D+CYBERLINK

GATEWAY+CYBERLINK

Not sure what to conclude from the above and the fact that the rest of the laptops did not play the video 100% smoothly. I think that Quad Core plays a large part to it unless you have a really advanced graphics card like Nvidia 9800M GTS with 1GB and above. What is apparent is that Cyberlink outperforms Splashlite.

The latter can be confirmed by COMPAQ where Cyberlink was the best video player and allowed me to view the video

with a reasonable performance. Other smaller videos actually played almost 100% smoothly on COMPAQ which is pretty encouraging to know.

What I can’t explain is the performance of SONY Z with a low spec graphics card and processor.. It far outperformed SONY F and SONY A which have better specs. Not sure why is that.

In terms of best value I would go with HP HDX 18t Quad Core and 1GB graphics. If I had more money I would definitely get ASUS. I really liked the look and construction of SONY AW and I haven’t tried it at 2.8Ghz yet with Cyberlink yet to test its performance – and probably won’t since it has such a great price difference with the HP HDX 18t.

Comparing XACTI FH1 with XACTI TH1
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I’ve owned many camcorders in my lifetime, five of them are sitting in my cabinets as I write. Here, I compare the Sanyo XACTI VPC-TH1 to the Sanyo XACTI VPC-FH1. There are so many things to compare that I will review the things most important to me in selecting a camcorder. Do the video quality and extra features justify the added cost of the FH1? Well, FH1 doesn’t have a lot more features than VH1. In fact, it is missing a few. However, the higher quality photos and video makes it a winner, in my book.

SIZE

Out of the box, both units appear exactly alike — small and compact, a diminutive size at only 4 inches long.

I see the difference when picking them up. The TH1 is noticeably lighter in weight, only 10.1 ounces compared to 11.2 ounces. Not much, but enough to notice.

The monitor unit on the FH1 (the part that flips open that has a screen on it) is more heavy duty than the TH1, though I wouldn’t call the monitor unit on the TH1 flimsy.

VIDEO FUNCTION

Just turn them on, point and shoot. It’s so easy. Both camcorders have a sleep mode that is automatically triggered when closing the monitor unit. From there, they turn on quickly when the monitor unit is reopened and you’ll never miss a shot. This sleep mode does not use up much battery life. In fact, I left them in sleep mode since yesterday night, used the camcorders to record and playback and the batteries still has plenty of life in it 24 hours later.

Both camcorders remember their settings. Whatever setting adjustments I make, they store when I turn them off so that my camcorder is ready when I turn them back on.

The video quality in incandescent light is better with the FH1. There is no graininess. I am surprised by the smoothness of the picture onscreen. However, there is a problem with the tinting going back and forth from green to red, which was a little annoying. TH1 is grainier by comparison.

Outdoors in daylight, the quality of TH1 improves enough to be satisfactory to the average mom filming her children’s birthdays. FH1 video is higher in quality, but I don’t think the casual user would care.

TH1 has a better zoom (30x optical), but I would need a tripod, because it gets very shaky. Otherwise, I try not to zoom too much. FH1 has 10x optical zoom, which I feel is adequate for my needs. It’s still shaky, though. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve yet to find a camcorder whose image stabilizer feature is adequate for my needs. Zoomed images are always shaky.

CAMERA FUNCTION

Both camcorders can take photos. Both camcorders have automatic flash. Both camcorders can take photos while filming. Both camcorders take high speed sequential photos. FH1 has 8MP resolution while TH1 has 2MP resolution.

The indoor photos of the TH1 are too grainy for my taste. FH1 takes better indoor and outdoor photos. I see no graininess.

I do not care for the photos taken while filming with either camcorder. There is too much of a lag time and I don’t even know if the photo I want is the one that I took. I have a Samsung SC-HMX20C that rules in the camera department. If you want a great camcorder that is also a good camera (wonderful photos indoors), you’ll want to look at that.

REMOTE

This isn’t something I’d ever use much, but it’s included with the FH1, so I think it’s worth mentioning. Some people like having a remote, if only to help when hooking the camcorder to a television to play back or maybe to record oneself. TH1 is missing a remote, but that may not matter to most people. It doesn’t make much difference to me.

The remote is tiny. My husband’s initial reaction to it was “It’s easy to lose.”

INTERNAL MEMORY

Both camcorders can us an SD or SDHC card. Only the TH1 has an internal memory. It’s not much, about 43 MB, enough for some photos or a short video clip. That can be useful for anyone whose ever forgotten to bring the memory card.

SUMMARY

I much prefer the FH1, because video quality ranks high on my list of most important things to look for in camcorders. There is enough of a difference between the FH1 and the TH1(especially indoors) for me to justify the difference in price. Although FH1 does have a little problem with tinting.

Photo quality is also important to me. FH1 takes better photos, and the higher resolution of the FH1 means I can blow up the photos. Too bad I can’t take photos very well with either camera while filming. For that, I need to go back to my Samsung.

Zoom is better in the TH1, but I don’t need it. Besides, it’s too shaky.

All other factors are very similar between the two camcorders. Average parent shooting birthday party videos for YouTube may prefer the TH1 for its lower price. Outdoor video is not as fine as FH1, but it is adequate for someone not too picky about that. Indoor video isn’t great; but it`s not bad, if there’s enough lighting.

FH1 gets four stars instead of five because it has trouble with the tinting under incandescent lighting and the camera function during filming suffers from severe lag. It is otherwise a very nice camcorder.

TH1 gets three stars because it’s adequate for the casual user, but video quality and photo quality can use improvement, especially indoors under lowlight conditions. Outdoor scenes are four stars — good, not great, but they are fine for the casual user. The camera function during filming also suffers from severe lag.

Packed with every feature you could want
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This may sound like something an old fuddy-duddy would say, but I literally could not believe how many features are packed into this TINY video camera, which is designed to fit neatly in the palm of your hand. (The attached strap makes it easy just to keep it at one’s side and whip it up whenever something video-worthy comes into view.) Read the Amazon listing closely — it does EVERYTHING the description says it does.

I use it with a 16GB SD card, and the whole operation of the camera and manipulation of the video, from shooting to uploading to storage, is amazing in its simplicity and convenience. It shoots in HD, too! Again, UNBELIEVABLE but true, lol! I highly, highly recommend this camera.

Great camera
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Greatest “take everywhere” camera I have ever seen, it will do everything and is very small and light weight. A pleasure to use!

I really want to love this camera.
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
This camera is brilliant. I have always loved anything I have bought from Sanyo.

I bought this camera a week before my vacation/elopement. I had to replace my old Sanyo VPC-E6U. I have had that camera for a few years now, and loved it the entire time. These days however, the photo sensor had been on the fritz, going black at times. I can’t take a camera in that condition on my honeymoon!

So, enter the VPC-FH1. I got this puppy expecting nothing awesomeness, and I got it for the most part.

It has a great user interface, videos look fantastic, battery lasts for all of eternity, but there is one HUGE problem.

More than half of my pictures were completely ruined by a bug in the firmware. Most pictures that I took were double exposed. Pictures of peoples faces looked like they were extracted from the movie The Ring. These pictures were absolutely crazy looking and not even worth showing people. That can be a horrible thing, considering I got this camera to take pictures of my elopement.

No setting changes will fix the problem, and I missed my window to return it to Amazon (because I went right out to vacation).

I don’t assume that all of the cameras are affected by this bug, and i still hold Sanyo to a high regard, but I would be very careful buying this camera in too short of a notice before any important events.

LOTS OF FUN CAMCORDER
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I bought the sanyo FH1 camcorder from amazon,after a weeks used I found this very small camcorder satified me 100%. I owned sony CX7, SR11, UX7,and TG1 before, but all those camcorder are too large the TG1 is small but the video was soft and pale.only the FH1 can allow the user to apply the manual setting like S, A, M, SHARPNESS, SPORT FOCUS, CUSMATIC, in video shooting.the result is the video quality output are really sharp better than TG1. because the camcorder can be totally controll by your hand.no other camcorder can do that. the EIS function is not bad as long as you hold the camcorder steady enough and the video won’t get much jerky.

Very good camera for the money
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This camera exeeded by expextations. I takes great pictures and good video. They image stabalization is not very good, but it can be easily solved with a tripod. Theres nothing on this camera that I just really hate. The LCD is huge. The ease of use is amazing with the SDHC cards. It really is a good camera for someone wanting low priced hd. Its sleek and it comes with evrething you need in the box (besides an SD card) Overall I recomend this camera to ANYONE. Plus it records in a really good format for Youtube

getting more from your sanyo hd
Rating:5 out of 5 stars

i have owned a bunch of sanyo starting from they first sanyo hd1.

first to help your computer play the Hugh 1080 i and 1080 60fps sanyo clips

you need corecodec [...] make sure you check ,preferred codec in configure box. or wont work,now even my laptops can play 1080i, and 60 fps smoothly

also ,

you can edit in camera too ,try it ,its more organized ,how?

you cut and join in camera ,cutting out shakiness .but if you used a h.dd you view it (edit) on your t.v screen ,and you can organize your fillers as thumbs nails on your h.dd ,and also you can add music out to your final movie on your computer and add it back into your library system ,as long as you keep the thumbnail numbers system true ,that, inserted back in, (first and last clip joined ) in between the starting clip and ending clip you can join any number clip you want , as the first and last has the needed information keep the thumbnail number system true, try small, sample and work from there,

Sanyo comes close (and some mac stuff)
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
The Sanyo VPC-FH1 is a very compact camcorder that shoots in a variety of frame sizes and frame rates such as 1080p/60, 720p/30 and 640×480 plus more — including a couple of resolution reduced high frame rate modes for slow motion that have mostly novelty value. It uses the now commonplace h264 compression which many applications support. The ability to shoot at different frame sizes is very useful — sometimes I do not need 1080p, with the resulting larger file sizes and demand of additional resources of my computer. Some HD digital video cameras do not offer this flexibility.

The media the camera uses is SDHC Class 6 memory cards. I purchased a Transcend 16GB card (model TS16GSDHC6E) which has worked well.

Quality belies the price of this camera. It is capable of producing very nice looking video, particularly outdoors or well lit indoor scenes. Low lighting may still give you a usable picture at the expense of additional noise — but it is better than Sanyo’s HD700, which I have used in the past. There is a decent amount of customization options for shooting, although some of these options are buried inside a menu system that requires some study for users that want to exploit those capabilities. Still image performance (this camera is billed as a “dual use” camera) is quite acceptable — conceivably someone could just take this one camera with them on a trip for shooting video and stills and be very happy. Notably the macro mode is very good.

Deficits include the battery being on the bottom of the camera under a plastic door, so it is unlikely that there will be higher capacity batteries for longer shoot times, or even the ability to quickly swap batteries if the camera is on a tripod. Use the included power supply or an external battery pack for long shoot times.

The image stabilization is a weak spot when compared to more expensive cameras such as the Canon HF-10. It is acceptable for wide angle shots, but marginal for zoomed shots. I found that autofocus at times could have been faster, but often enough it worked well. Unlike the Sanyo HD2000 and Canon’s HF10, this camera does not have a mike input. The on-board microphones work well, and there is a wind noise reduction option. Aesthetically the camera is attractive and fits well in the hand, but the side of the camera is covered with labeling including one sticker which was difficult to remove. Picky I know.

The camera comes with a host of accessories such as a very handy remote for shooting stills and video, controlling zoom and playback. Connection to a computer is through a sub-usb cable (not to be confused with a more common mini-usb connector) which has a standard USB connector on the other end. When connected to a computer the camera can be used as a mass storage device (like a card reader), but can also be used as a camera for PC/Mac applications. I managed to have the camera work on my Mac with Quicktime Pro to capture video, but iChat would not recognize the camera. In this mode you are limited to 640×480 resolution, and the zoom is disabled. The camera is HDMI capable, but comes with an analog cable (!) for connection to a television. The lens is threaded so that it can use accessory lenses and filters — Sanyo has wide-angle lenses available.

Footage from the camera can be ingested into a variety of editing packages. I tried content shot in a variety of resolutions/modes with tools such as iMovie 09, Final Cut and After Effects and had no difficulty. Editing 1080P/60 really taxed my MacBook Pro “UniBody” 2.66 Ghz. I was particularly impressed at how iMovie was able to handle footage from this camera. In the case of Final Cut I cross encoded the content to Apple’s Intermediate codec for better performance — which is what I typically do with footage from the Canon HF10 as well.

This camera is often compared to the Canon HF10, which many considered to be the benchmark for sub-1k HD camcorders, but that is obviously unfair as the Sanyo is approximately 2/3 the price. The HF10 has a 24fps mode the Sanyo lacks , but otherwise the Sanyo’s flexibility of different frame sizes is likely to be more useful for most casual shooters. It is not a HF10 “killer” but at times comes close enough to be difficult to spot. I have shot footage with both and was struck more by the similarities than the differences.

This is not a “professional” camera, but I have finished two projects that used this camera. Overall, I am quite happy with it and plan on using for an upcoming documentary project.

Perfect Football Mom Camera
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I looked a LONG time, and went through a few other cameras before settling on this one – it fits my needs for taking video of High School Football games PERFECTLY. Zoom is great, as is stability. I love that I can take a still shot at the same time a video is being recorded. The file format is fully compatible with my computer and software – Mac and iMovie. The image quality is AMAZING. I have video taped 8 games in varying degrees of light, processed them with iMovie and iDVD, and viewed them on a large screen HD TV – the image quality, while it is not professional grade – is amazing for a camera less than $500, and certainly fits our needs. Thanks Sanyo for a great product!

Nice little camera
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
Bought two of these to replace my Canon GL-2. They’re not bad. Two things I’ve noticed that reinforce what I read prior to purchasing. 1) You have to shoot from a tripod, glide cam or other fixed position apparatus, especially if you’re going to zoon. 2) The on board audio is not the greatest and there is no external audio input. If you want to do any professional sounding work, you’re going to need a seperate audio recorder.

Letdown
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
Had it Not been for the image stabilization of this camcorder, I would have given it a five star.

After shooting and watching the results, I realized the video was too wobbly for me to watch for any length of time.

Ok if you mount the camcorder on a tri-pod, or only shoot video in the wide mode.

Use of zoom when recording in a hand-held mode was beyond what I would consider a watchable video.

Sanyo ran up 99 steps, then fell on its face on the last one.

I did return the camcorder.

Amazing camera for the price!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
If money is no object and optical image stabilization is your primary concern, then I recommend you buy the Canon HFS10 or HFS100. Now, with that out of the way, you have to temper your expectations with what you paid for. This camera is at least $600 less than the HFS100 for basically the same image quality minus image stabilization. You will see that I compare this with the Canon a lot because Canon has been king of the camcorder scene for a few years now.

Pros:

The image quality is almost as good and even better than the Canon in some aspects (based on online reviews as I don’t own the Canon). The low light sensitivity is excellent (there is an option to turn up the sensitivity level). The thing we need to keep in mind is this: camcorders are best when used in areas with plenty of light. There is really no reason to film at night unless you absolutely need to. For the times when you want to film the night light or night scenery, this camcorder does its job very well. When hooked up to my 1080p television, the video was spectacular. I can’t imagine how much better the Canon would be but I’m very satisfied with this. I know that it’s impossible for the Canon to be twice as good as this camcorder for twice the price, at least for me.

It is small! I can definitely take this with me on vacation every where I go and not tire out my arms. It’s much smaller than I expected, almost like a toy. Having used 5-pound camcorders in the past, this is definitely a good thing.

I can now leave my point and shoot camera at home as this substitutes as a regular still camera, hence the dual camera moniker. It takes 8 meg stills (don’t use the 12 meg option as that’s interpolated) which is impressive for a camcorder this size/price. There are ISO adjustments which I believe is lacking in the Canon.

Cons:

Image stabilization. If you like to film videos without tripods, monopods then I suggest you stay away from this. However, for under $500, I was able to buy this camcorder and a tripod, 16GB SDHC, and a camcorder bag. No optical stabilization can match a tripod/monopod. If you’re serious about creating timeless videos that you can view 20 years from now, you need a tripod. Period.

Yes, it would be nice if the image stabilizer was better for the times when I don’t have a tripod with me. However, it’s serviceable if I hold the camera very steady so it’s not as bad as some people would lead you to believe. I don’t plan on filming while walking very often so it’s perfectly fine. If you have a shaky hand problem and hate tripods/monopods then stay clear.

You can mitigate shaking with (1) a tripod, (2) steady hands, or (3) deshaker software (free online). You cannot mitigate $600 or low light sensitivity. No matter what camcorder you buy, you will need a tripod eventually if you’re serious about taking good videos. So budget that into your purchase plan.

Normally, I would deduct one star for the bad image stabilization, but for a camcorder with superb image quality, low light sensitivity, and the fact that I can throw in a 16GB SDHC, tripod, and camera bag (all bought separately of course) for around $500, it’s absurd to dock a star for it. This is the best camcorder for the money.

Amazing
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I’ve had the camera for about a month. Works great. I import my files into iMovie ’09 for Mac by using a SD card reader. The battery life is fantastic. I don’t even need to record in 1080p all the time.

One problem is you cannot turn off the display while recording. If you are at a conference recording some long talks, it could drain the battery more than necessary. This is especially strange for recording audio only, the screen stays on. But the battery life is fantastic, and I used it successfully at three conferences recording some parts. Honestly, I wouldn’t record the entire thing anyway because it takes so long to do any kind of video editing.

The size is perfect, I just stuffed it in my front pocket at Disneyland and Seaworld and pulled it out to record whenever I felt like it. It was in my jeans. Then when we went on water rides, I put it in my girlfriend’s purse.

Also, it works as a webcam without downloading drivers on Mac OS X 10.5, so when I use Skype and I have it plugged in and set on the camera to share, Skype recognizes it instantly. Same for iMovie and Quicktime so I could use it to record directly to my computer, or do a live broadcast with Quicktime.

The strap that comes with it has a place to stick the lense cap so it doesn’t wave around and get in the way.

I have used the “Dual Shot” feature to take a picture while videoing just to make it easier to email someone without having to extract a frame from the video manually when I got home. Also I used it to record people preparing for a photo, because it’s more interesting to see everyone’s personality while preparing. But really, who want’s to look at a photo when you have a video? If you want to save battery and disk space you could use the camcorder as a camera, but it’s much cooler to record lots of video at the smallest HD and make a DVD, than to look at a photo album.

The camcorder is pretty light too, it sits on one of those funky gorilla tripods made for regular cameras just fine.

Also the red recording light is in the back so people won’t notice as easily that you are recording and start acting if you are looking for naturalness.

There are many languages including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Korean. But not Japanese, which seems prejudiced.

It has two microphones for stereo sound on the front. At the park I could pickup people about 20 yards away when they were talking loudly, so it worked well for filming a softball game from the outfield.

The quick settings buttons click pretty loud, so if you need to lock the focus or exposure while filming, it will pick up the sound. But it comes with a remote control that you can use instead to avoid the jolt motion and click sound from pressing the button.

Love most features, but…
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Agree with most of the positive comments. Only letdown has been the portability of the MP4 files recorded. Currently trying to find a way to play on my PC using VLC.

** Update **

I have been able to watch recorded videos on my PC using VLC by lowering the resolution. I am still unable to play HD videos at max resolution on my PC.

Excellent camera for the price
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I just bought this camcorder after about 6 months of research. My objective was clear – to buy a good HD camcorder for less than $500. I looked at quite a few Canon and Sony models and frankly did not think they are worth the price. This little camcorder is a gem. For the price you cannot beat the features it packs and the picture it produces. Granted, in low light, picture quality is not going to be as vibrant, but compared to the others out there, it is pretty good. The picture in good light is exceptional. Yes, the image stabilization being digital has some issues, probably explains why it fails to focus when you zoom in but editing can take care of that. By the way, the editing features in the camcorder are superb, you can cut or join a clip in camera. I use the 30 fps quality most of the time and it serves the purpose. The photo quality is not the best, but will do the job for the most part. I have a Canon XSI for that. All in all, this camera is a no-brainer at this price. Go for it, you will not regret the purchase. I will post a video clip soon.

Solid, affordable HD camera for amateur use
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I found this to be a decent camera for ordinary home video use. You’ll get fairly good results just pointing and shooting. (Which is a good thing, since the manual is very difficult to navigate.) The camera is small and lightweight, easy to carry about, and fairly comfortable to hold.

For playback, it comes with a mini component cable, but I found that to be pretty wonky trying to connect it to my Samsung LCD. It does NOT come with a mini-HDMI cable, so I couldn’t test that out. It DOES come with a mini-to-A USB cable so you can easily connect it to your computer. Trying to view the videos on the PC while streaming the date from the camera is not practical, unfortunately, as the data transfer speed of USB is too slow to correctly handle HD video. Your best bet is to transfer the files off the card to the PC, provided you have a card reader, or copy them to the PC via the USB cable (this will be slow), then watch and edit them with whatever software you like later. You can also edit the videos a little, cutting or joining clips, on the camera itself.

As you can see, it has no viewfinder, you have to watch the LCD screen to frame the picture while you’re recording. This can be a problem, as sunlight reflecting off the screen will make it difficult to see what you’re filming, and the LCD screen suffers from the viewing angle limitations you’re probably familiar with if you own an LCD TV set.

Bottom line: It’s easy to use, produces good quality videos, and it’s relatively affordable for an HD camera. If you’re looking to pick up an HD camera for run-of-the-mill home videos, vacation videos, etc., give this one a shot.

Great budget full HD camcorder
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I’ve been using this camcorder for about 2 months now. It’s very small, smaller than a can of soda. It has a removable lens cap which is sort of clunky, but does include a tether for the cap so you don’t sit it down and lose it. Includes a hand strap, but you have to attach the strap yourself. Also includes a wireless remote control that does basic functions.

There is no viewfinder on the camera, just an LCD display. The LCD is widescreen (just like the video) and is sharp and bright. It can rotate up to 180 degrees to face the front. The only downside is the LCD must be opened for the camera to shoot, if you close the LCD it goes into a low-power “sleep” mode. I found this a bit annoying when shooting from a tripod.

The camera saves to a SD card, but includes no SD card, and has no internal memory. I found that to be slightly annoying since SD cards are so cheap these days, and this isn’t really a cheap camera.

The controls are simple and fairly intuitive. There are 4 buttons and a 4-way thumbstick. At the top left is the still picture button, and at the top right is the video record button. I found it really easy to hit the video record button though, so as I walked around with the camera I accidentally took many short video clips of the ground or sky.

The HD video it shoots is excellent, at best it’s on par with what I see on HD broadcast television. It’s low-light capability is impressive as well. On the first night as I walked around my dimly lit house, the video was much brighter than the actual house was. The color is vivid and seems true-to life.

When you move the camera quickly or even semi-quickly, the video gets blocky. This is a fairly big problem when you’re panning around trying to capture a landscape or whatnot, you just have to remember to pan s-l-o-w-l-y.

The 16x zoom is impressive, but you have to have a very steady hand or brace yourself against something to get stable video at that zoom level. The camera has image stabilization, but it’s not optical (the good kind), it’s software image stabilization and only helps to a certain extent. Use of a tripod will help greatly when zooming.

The video files it produces are .MP4, and don’t play well on every computer and with every video player, probably partly because they are so large in size and resolution. I had best luck with Media Player Classic and plain old Media Player, but I’m not sure exactly what video codecs I have installed. I found that VLC didn’t play the files very well, it’s normally my leanest and best video player. The best playback other than the camera itself is my Playstation 3, all I have to do is pop the card out of the camera and plug it in the PS3 (before planning to do this, make sure your PS3 has a SD card reader.) The video files are 1080p and are fairly large, plan on at least 100MB per minute. The files will be larger if you’re shooting something like the ocean with lots of motion, or smaller if your scene is largely static. The largest file I’ve shot is 2.6 GB, that was 20 minutes of video. I haven’t tried exceeding 4GB yet, that will be a problem if the SD card isn’t formatted NTFS and/or if the camera doesn’t support NTFS.

This camcorder will also shoot plain-old JPG images. The images are about 8 megapixels, but I have it shooting widescreen resolution of about 3200×1800. I was expecting it to be the best of both worlds (video and still pics), but I found the image quality is decent but not great. There is also a good amount of shutter lag, like up to 1 second even without flash. The low-light capability of the still pictures isn’t very good, but I’m not sure why since it seems the lens would be the same as the camcorder. The outdoor pictures are much better, and the 16x zoom really lets you get up close to distant subjects. On my last outing the still pictures had a problem where they looked dull, and there was sort of an offset ghost image to the right of everything. Not sure if that was because of some setting I changed, but I changed my settings back to the defaults and I think it cleared up. Maybe partly because the lens is 16x, it can be sort of hard to shoot close-up objects, you have to step back to get everything in the frame. The macro capability is good though, provided you have enough light.

The battery life is very good, I shot pics and video for about a day and a half off and on before it died.

So, to sum it up, quite small, beautiful HD video (with a few quirks), so-so still pics compared to a nice digital camera, shoots to SD cards which is very handy, good battery life.

Great camera for the money
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I bought this camera for its compatibility with Mac computers which seems to be rare among consumer grade video cameras. I tried several other brands and models without success. This one is recognized by my Mac and iMovie. iMovie produces files that can be used in Final Cut Pro. The video quality is not exceptional but it is adequate for the price and functionality. Its ability to take photos while shooting video is really handy and the photo quality is adequate as well. Its smallness makes it difficult to keep steady and requires you to steady it with your body, a tripod or a large sturdy object. This is common among other cameras of this size. There are probably not too many cameras that are easily held steady that you can also put in your pocket. With a 16 or 32 Gb SD card 11 hours of standard definition video can be stored. With flash memory it gets into action quickly and and the battery last for over three hours of continuous running time.

Pushes the envelop on a few but takes a step back on the rest
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
I am returning the FH1 today … replacing with a refurb HG10 (for about the same price).

My gripes with the FH1 …

- much slower focus (much worse indoors)

- Noise Reduction always active (yes I turned it off in Settings) … this causes less detail, especially indoors.

- AWB is very poor

- Chromatic Aberration is much greater (poorer quality lens ?) … especially at 16X (probably caused by that goofy ‘advanced’ zoom)

- No EVF (not a fan of framing through the LCD screen)

- lower-res LCD screen … also has color-shift. On mine, purple appeared blue.

- plastic tripod mount … is it really that expensive to make it metal ?

- no mic input

- no built-in storage (not a negative but has to be accounted for to make it a fair comparision; HG10 has 40GB of space; to make the FH1 close to par … a 32GB SDHC would cost at least $80 additional)

- Manual cap is a bother … a few times it came off inside the cam bag … making the lens very vulnerable to external elements. Recommend getting a screw-on lens cap if the appropriate thread size is available,

- No way to disable the 16X advanced zoom. I prefer the 10x optical zone.

- 60p is great on the FH1 … but other hardware not yet versatile in handling 60p. They eventually will be … I think I will wait … and certainly by then 60p cams will be standard).

- More accessories and after-market stuff for Canon

- Last but not least … the lack of proper stabilization (the digital stabilization actually make the rolling shutter problem worse … avoid using it even for wide angle shots)

Do you really want HD with this lens?
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I have used this camcorder for over three months and in two trips to Asia. I find the camcorder to be very usable in terms of its ergonomics and its menu system and the huge LCD display is bright enough even in direct sunlight. However, I must honestly say that I am not impressed at this camcorder when used in its HD mode, which I believe to be the most appealing factor for those who will pick this camcorder for its affordable price. Yes, it can record a ton of data per second and give you a lot of details, but if anything I find that the HD-ness only amplifies its less-than-stellar lens performance. In particular, I find a lot of chromatic aberrations around edges when compared to an SD Canon that I purchased at more than double the price only 1.5 years back, and the lens easily loses contrast due to internal flare at bright conditions. My advice is to use this camera only at SD, which tames the optical flaws by not capturing them in high resolution. The files will be smaller too and your battery will run out before you fill a 16GB card.

This brings me to a small nuisance: this camera does not seem to have an internal battery to keep its settings. Every time I unplug the battery the clock gets reset. It minorly ruined my travel experience but it is not a deal-breaker. Another small problem is that the electronic image stabilization works well only if you keep it to the low zoom levels. I can really appreciate the difference between electronic and optical image stabilization once I get pass 4x. I must stress that this is not a big limitation in practice, but if capturing at high zoom is important then it is easy to justify the extra expense in an optical image stabilization system.

P.S. I never bothered to capture stills with this given the lens performance.

Great Travel Camcorder, Great Quality, Lousy for Editing
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The quality of the video is awesome! However, it captures in H.264 which is meant as a delivery medium, NOT an editing medium. If you want to edit your videos, you need to transcode into an editable format. That’s not a big deal, but does take away some of the convenience of flash based recording. Would buy again. VERY small and easy to carry around. The still shots are also very good.

Excellent Camcorder but could be improved
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I bought this camcorder about 5 months ago. I saw the review about VPC2000 instead but couldn’t get here. All were from HongKong without US warranty. So, I decided to buy this since most of features are same.

After trying a few HD pictures, I was amazed how good it is. Now I am in different filed but I was working for Video compression 10 years ago. I was developing MPEG2, H.263 and H.264 H/W codec. I was in the team developing DV format codec chips. I was also part of the lab developing Mpeg2 codec ASIC as well. We all discussed how to support such a high bandwidth requirement using SDRAM memory. Projected clock frequency was above 100MHz without any cooling devices. There was no way we could pack into this small size camcorder.

Though it’s small, it’s the first camcorder supporting full HD resolution with 60 progressive frame. Bottom line is you can get stunning video output at the end of the day. You can choose many different format such as full HD with 30frame or 720p and so on. Depending on your need, such as long recording with lower bitrate or higher resolution but shorter recording time.

The most important factor to convince me to buy this camcorder is low light performance. I looked at the camcorder review site and this camcorder showed one of the best performance under low light situation. I take lots of video for my kids indoor. Most of the time, lighting is not sufficient. There’s no guarantee I need to take picture only during day time. I want to capture the short moments, my infant’s first flipping, first sitting, first walking sort of thing. This camcorder is nice since it turns on instantly and also performs well in any situation.

This camcorder is very handy and small. Very easy to use and menu is well defined. There are 4 arrow buttons which you can assign any function as a short cut, which means you can adjust exposure, ISO and so on without navigating lengthy menu. Sleep function is also nice that you can put this into sleep whenever you close the screen. It automatically resumes when you open up the display. You never need to turn it off. Battery is as small as just cell phone battery but it still provides 2 hour of recording. Though bigger capacity battery is not supported, you can always recharge using micro USB cable.

Now the downside.

Comparing my old Sony DV camcorder, it lacks optical image stabilization. FH1 supports Electronic Image Stabilization but there’s no way to think it actually works from image. There are many anti-shake software as a post processing tool but those tool usually reduces resolution since image borders are used to compensate camera shake. So if you assume to use such software, you need to put more into the screen to compensate reduced border later.

Wacky white balance. Most of the time, white balance works well but it doesn’t change gradually when you span your camcorder. It seems to have big step size between different modes. If I want from outside to indoor, camcorder adjusts white balance upon different lighting situation and I see big change. Sometimes, under certain condition, camcorder can’t decide which mode to take for sure. Then it switches back and forth and it frequently change in the colors. For other camcorders, white balance changes gradually so, you don’t see dramatic changes for final result. So, it seems to be better to set manual mode. At least it’s possible to apply white balance using 3rd party software.

Optical performance. Under strong light condition, I see strong chromatic aberration around the corner. It’s so strong that, I couldn’t fix the problem using Photoshop or Lightroom. Initially, I bought this camcorder to use for both video as well as photo but I decided not to use since it doesn’t work very well outdoor during daytime.

File numbering. It keeps incrementing photo and video file numbers but, if I remove existing files from SD, the number goes back to 0. That gives me some headache to maintain video of different times. It would be also nice to provide some sort of software to download and performs some post processing.

Lack of external microphone. The built in microphone works greatly. One day I went to playground to play kite. My wife took the video from very far around 70~80 ft. It still captured my son’s laughing. I was amazed. However, It would be nice if there’s hookup for external microphone.

I still think this camcorder is great deal for such price. Not only price, it also performs very well compared to Canon or Sony. I just hope Sanyo improves a little bit in next firmware update. (Sanyo occasionally releases firmware update to fix minor problems.)

OK but not great
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
First off, the lens cover on this camera is attached with a little nylon string. I’m not sure how anyone is losing it unless they’re taking the string off. It’s not as handy as an automatic cover, but automatic covers sometimes fail to open. It’s small, lightweight and seems sturdy enough to survive a fall or two (though I don’t plan on testing it in that regard).

This camera is a higher-end version of the Sanyo VPC-TH1(Silver), but it’s not much better. The trade off for this one is 16x optical zoom as opposed to 30 on the VPC-TH1, and 8 megapixel still shots instead of the useless 2 megapixels on the other Sanyo. However the image stabilization it claims to have is practically non-existant in my opinion. I get better stills with a two year old 7.2 megapixel Sony still shot camera, which is really inexcusable.

Video of course is just as shaky as ever, so you’re not going to be able to leave your tripod at home. I got better results with low lighting than with the VPC-TH1, and it’s got a nice, big LCD screen so you can see what you’re shooting. However I was not impressed with the video quality even though this videocam is supposed to be HD. Comparable cameras also have internal memory in addition to removable memory. This one has to have an SD card at all times.

Overall it’s not a bad camera, but I need better image stabilization than this. Maybe if you’re a surgeon and your hands never shake you might get this to work for you as an all-purpose camera suitable for family memories. For me this is something I would use for throwaway videos and You Tube commentary, and there are better values out there that will accomplish that.

Sanyo Xacti FH1
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I received my Sanyo Xacti FH1 Sept 3rd 2009, and I have been really impressed. Granted this is not a professional HD camcorder, but the results have been extremely good. I’ve used a mono-pod with a Davis and Sanford ball head or a home made steady cam for my filming, which have resulted in very stable and crisp video. I looked at the Canon and JVC SD card camcorders before purchasing the FH1, and I think the video quality is better on the Sanyo. The colors are richer and the 1080P resolution at 60fps created a more immersive image. The Macro shots on the Sanyo are Amazing. I have only done some test shots indoors, and yes, the noise is slightly higher, but using ISO 50 makes this more than acceptable. I will say the video can appear too contrasty with mixed bright sunlight and shadowed images in the video. There were a lot of reviews complaining about the photo quality, but I haven’t found this to be an issue, especially with good lighting. My Video Studio 11+ software did not recognize the MP4 files from the camera, but the camera ships with Nero video editing software which does the job. I would definitely recommend this camera, especially at up to $150 cheaper than the Canon.

Great Camera
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Well we have had this camera for about a month, and we love it. It takes great pictures and video. I love that even with a shakey hand the video still comes out looking great. My husband was worried about this cause his hands seem to always shake, but the video doesn’t even show it. I love the 8 megapixel camera on it also. I have been using it on our pug and the pictures come out GREAT!!!! This is one hell of a camera for the price. I looked around for about a month before deciding on which one to get. The only reason I went with HD is because of the price of this one. The next one that compares to it retails for about 1200.00. So to get this one for only 400.00 was a STEAL. I do have HD TV and everything and when we hook this up to it, it looks great. I can’t wait for my daughter to get here so we can start filming her on it. Great camera for the price.

Camcorder bargain of the year… so far
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This is my fourth HD camcorder… I own a higher-end Sony (HVR-A1U), a Canon HV10, and formerly a Hitachi BD70A Blu-Ray model. I have been “doing video” since the 80s.

First of all… do keep the price in mind. This Sanyo VPC-FD1 was never intended to be confused for a professional model. Neither are the $1300-$1500 units from Canon (S10/S100/S11) or Panasonic (TM300). However, they are all symptomatic of the reality that the line between “pro” and “consumer” is blurring, at least with regard to picture quality.

The quality of this camera’s HD image is quite good. It holds up well in low light… much better than any other consumer model I have used myself. It’s also very good at capturing fast motion, which has until recently been a big problem for AVC based models, rather than DV or MPEG-2. It’s not without some artifacting, but quite a bit better than earlier models, in my experience.

Some places claim the lens is 16x… it’s really a 10x zoom lens, optically speaking. The 16x comes, as with many consumer camcorders, from “digital zoom”… that’s when the software just uses a small bit of the whole sensor. They claim to be doing this intelligently… could be. In normal use, there’s an 8Mpixel sensor here being cropped to about 6Mpixel… that’s three times the pixels you need to create a 1080p image. That’s also useful… you get better color and better light sensitivity, but if you cut out 2/3 of these, you’ll still have decent HD video. More than that, and you’ll get noticable pixelization. Which you do see in the viewfinder using digital zoom, but I have yet to look at it in finished video. Just something to be aware of.

The Great Big Feature of this model is 1080/60p video… you have to go to a pretty high-end professional model to get this anywhere other than in the VPC-FD1 or VPC-HD2000. Pros would like a higher bitrate than 24Mb/s (it’s actually variable bitrate, peaking around 28-29Mb/s so far as I’ve seen), but it’s not bad… the software clearly knows how to avoid macroblock distortion by adding a bit of low-pass filtering (slight blurring when necessary… don’t worry, it does improve the video quality… compression mastering engineers do the same thing on DVDs to ensure that high speed video looks a good as it can on DVDs).

There are some caveats. One is the whole flash meets video meets FAT32 thing… like other current flash-based camcorders, this one uses the FAT32 file system. That offers big storage on 16GB and 32GB flash cards, but the maximum file size is 4GB. This means that, after about 21-something-minutes at 1080/60p, the camcorder needs to close one file and open another. That wouldn’t be bad, only that the Sanyo doesn’t pipeline this, so there’s a delay of a few seconds between the end of one file and the start of another. Sure, it’s better by far than changing 8cm DVDs every 20 minutes on a DVD camcorder, but it’s an issue. They could fix this in firmware… they ought to. You get more time in a 4GB file as you drop to lower video modes (1080/60i, 1080/30p, 720/30p).

I have shot a number of High School soccer games with this in 1080/60p, and I get great results. Last year, I used my Sony in 1080/60i mode; this is overall better video. For one, I can downconvert to web video without interlacing artifacts. I can decide, after I shoot the video, if I want to make a 1080/60i, 1080/30p, 1080/24p, or 720/60p Blu-Ray disc, assuming I target Blu-Ray for delivery. That’s pretty nice.

The other big issue is edit. Know this now: your PC is probably going to struggle just to play back 1080/60p at full frame rate. Neither Windows Media Player nor VLC had a prayer of playing this back on my Q9550-based desktop (that’s 2.83GHz, quad core, 4GB fast DRAM, etc) on a 1200p monitor. Splash Lite did play it back, but used 65-75% of CPU power… that’s all four CPUs. Using Nero Showtime with GPU acceleration enabled, I was able to play this video back with under 50% CPU on my desktop, and just about 100% CPU on my laptop (both using nVidia 8600 GPUs).

So when it comes to editing, you’re in trouble. I don’t know of a video editor yet that uses either multithreaded rendering or GPU acceleration during editing (most use the former for rending a final video… at least one also uses GPU acceleration). I opted to buy CineForm NeoVision for this. CineForm is an “intermediate CODEC”… you convert from your shooting format to CineForm for editing, then render to MPEG-2 or AVC or whatever you want for delivery. In theory, this means a loss of quality, in practice, nothing you can see. In fact, CineForm interpolates the 4:2:0 color of AVC to 4:2:2, so if you’re doing lots of compositing and effects, the quality could actually improve. You need a ton of space for CineForm.. it runs over 100GB per hour of 1080/60p video.

The video format is MPEG-4 AVC in an MPEG-4 transport stream wrapper (.MP4). This is similar to, but not the same thing as, AVCHD, which is MPEG-4 AVC in an MPEG-2 transport stream wrapper. AVCHD is a full consumer standard, MP4 isn’t, really. However, Sanyo’s choices here should work with most software.. they’re using MPEG-4 AVC at Level 4.2, and AAC audio, which is the usual MPEG-4 compressed audio format (AVCHD uses AC-3, formerly known as Dolby Digital, which is one of the Blu-Ray and DVD standards… the AVCHD standard really comes from Blu-Ray). I believe Sanyo has been making MPEG-4 camcorders longer than most companies, so they do have their act together here, even if they’re not following the current popular standard to the letter.

I have not used still photo mode. They claim it’s as good as a typical P&S still camera (that’s the “Dual Camera” thing). I used my HV10 as a still camera, for about 300 photos, on a backpacking trip, and would have liked something better… I would be surprised if the Sanyo didn’t do better stills. But it’s not usually that important to me.

The battery is inside the camera, so you can’t really get a much larger one. But unlike many kits, the stock battery delivers 150-180 minutes, which is ok. Also good is the fact this battery has been used by both Sanyo and Kodak for awhile… they didn’t feel compelled to have to create a brand new cell here. So you can find 3rd party cells, chargers, and all.

The lens takes a 37mm filter/accessory, which is fairly standard. I was able to fit a polarizer from my Canon and a wide-angle lens from an old Sony SD camcorder… all good. There’s no automatic lens cap.. there’s a real lens cap that stows in the cloth handle when not being used.. fine with me. Those mechanical shutters generally break.

The image stabilization on this is digital (like my Sony), not optical (like my Canon).. that means it’s inherently not as good. Optical these days always wins. With that said, optical can get confused by vibrations, and it can break if you drop the camera (so can other things, but that’s one of the first to go). I usually shoot video from a tripod or monopod anyway, so this wasn’t a big deal for me.

If you’re buying just one camcorder, and plan to use it for video and audio, you probably don’t want the VPC-FH1 (you might consider the VPC-HD2000, which is much the same, only in Sanyo’s pistol form). The reason is simple: the mics are built-in, no plug to add an external mic. Microphones built-in on camcorders are general bad. The FH1′s aren’t noticably better or worse than anyone else’s, they’re just typical built-in mics. Not very sensitive, no wind screen, and … well, at least they won’t pick up tape noise like similar mics on similarly small DV and HDV camcorders. I have a Rode mic for my Sony that cost nearly as much as the FH1… you can imagine it does a bit better on the audio than any built-in. But it you’re using this as a “B” camera, or using a field recorder for audio, that’s not such a concern. The mics are located just below the lens, which is a superior location… many small camcorders put them on top somewhere, where your fingers will undoubtedly antagonize them no-end.

Good Cam with minor issues
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
+ HD Material compatible with Mac iLife and PS3 without converting

+ easy to use

- Bad image stabilizer

Best camera, but see detils
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Let me start with bad:

- picture quality is bad (I’m talking about photo, not video). It is NOT an 8 megapixel camera. Do not try 8 MP. It is noisy even in the best lighting conditions, and it is oversharped, and still blurry.

- 1080 60p is cool, but what are you going to do with it? I cannot find any video player, that plays it adequately. Capture for future, hoping that in 2015 you will have some solution to watch it? No, thanks. My quad-core Phenom II cannot display it adequaltely with any software, but the camcoder can. So I wonder – what kind of magic hardware does it have inside? Yes, at least you can play it from the camcoder.

- 600 FPS is pretty much useless due to small resolution.

- recording start lag is about 1 second – you can miss all the cool stuff!

Don’t stop here – there are enough GOOD things about this camcoder to outweight bad.

1. there is no HDMI cable in the package, but, surprisingly, composit output supports up to 1080x60p, and my LCD TV understands it. I can watch full HD from this camera on my TV right out of the box.

2. 240 FPS mode is amazing! First thing you will notice – 240 frames per second – is not that much. It is limited to 10 seconds. It does not record audio. But still it is so cool! How else whould you record it?

3. High Definition video is high quality. This is HD video camera, and it does what it supposed to – record HD – and it does it good.

4. Battery life is quite good

5. There is no internal memory – for me it is good, cause few megabytes of intenal memory in a camera is confusing (you think you are Ok when you forgot your flash card at home till you shoot the first 10 pictures).

6. low light mode is very noisy – too bad even for 720p. Not any better than in my old DV camera. However, in a regular mode and with flashlight, I was able to capture quite descent and sharp video at night camp party.

A fine little camcorder.
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
The Sanyo VPC-FH1 HD camcorder is easy to use and produces high quality video. My only complaint is the common one: it is so small that it is very difficult to prevent unwanted jitter in your videos without use of a steadying device of some type. But with that said, I believe it would be hard to match the output at anywhere near this price level.

Incredible
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
awesome, it has everything you need to get started producing some pro videos. now days you can make magic with the software, but nothing compares to a great image from the start and this cam delivers.

Compatibility issue
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
It is indeed a great camera, low light performance is amazing, although doesn’t have image stability function, I found ever those that do have(like canon), I still have to use a tripod or monopod, so not a big deal. But there are a few main compaints:

1 Customer service sucks, I had to hold the phone for 10 minutes before talking to anyone.

2 The camera does not record date time information, asked customer service guy, He said it is impossible to record date/time info in video mode, so be careful not to lose the file date/time, otherwise you won’t know when the video was recorded.

3 Automatic White balance is not very accurate, had to use manual from time to time.

4 Audio format is not compatible with ffmpeg(a popular video converter), I had to use “copy” mode to downgrade the videos. Although video format is recognized by ffmpeg(with some errors).

5 Battery could be stronger, my old SONY camera goes for hours and hours, but this one max out at about 2 and half hours. ALthough I have to admit the battery is much smaller than SONY’s.

Performs Well
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
My previous camcorder was a Canon HF11 and overall this Sanyo is comparable and I’m happy with it. It’s small, light and comfortable in my hand. I don’t like that it has a manual lens cover and I’ll need to remember to take it off and put it back on again before and after use. Also, it came without the cord attaching the lens cover to the camera and I had a very difficult time getting it onto the cover. The grip belt gave me a bit of trouble too when I tried to put that on the camera. The camcorder charged quickly when I got it and was ready to use within a couple of hours.

This camcorder has no internal memory, everything is recorded on the memory card. I tested filming in a variety of situations – day/night, indoor/outdoor, low light/bright light, near/far, still/action – and it performed well. It was easy to use; the buttons and menus were very intuitive. It has a clear LCD and the playback images look great. Being able to take still pictures while filming is a very nice feature and the pictures look terrific. The image stabilization is not the best, but it’s good enough and if I want better I can attach the camera to my tripod.

It was also easy to play back video on the TV and the picture looked really nice. The sound quality is decent. Sometimes people sound as if they are in a tunnel, but it’s not bad. The software is fine too. It’s easy to use and does what’s needed. I think anyone looking for better audio or software that does fancy things would be spending more for a professional camera. This performs well and is commiserate with the price. Overall I am very pleased with the ease of use and performance of the camcorder.

GREAT CAMCORDER
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Great Camcorder!! What can I say? I did extensive research to find the best camcorder to purchase and I found it. The SANYO HD 1080P is a great camcorder and does everything you need it to do with exceptional video quality and the ease of an SD card. Thank you, Amazon, for giving me a great price on this fantastic camcorder! Five Stars !!!

Good Camera and Future Proof
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
For starters, I should say that this is my first video camera. My use for the camera will be primarily vacation and family videos.

I’ve spent two days at amusement parks with the camera so far. I’ve shot various resolutions including the top 1080p60 mode. When played back from the camera into a 1080p television, the results were just stunning.

The unfortunate thing, and the part that brings my review down one star, is that this footage is nearly impossible to work with at this time. My computer is a dual core laptop with a good quality (though mobile) nVidia video card. When trying out various video editing software, I found that none could actually play back the video at full resolution and speed. Sony Vegas simply crashed if you selected one of these files. I finally settled on Pinnacle because it didn’t crash and could show the full frame rate in the preview (thought not full resolution).

By Future Proof, I mean that the current generation of editing software and computers aren’t really built for 1080p60 video yet. It’s good to know that I can continue to shoot at a lower resolution or frame rate (I’m currently shooting 1080p30 which plays pretty well on my system). Once computers and software catch up, then I can move up to the full 1080p60.

Pros:

- lots of manual settings

- excellent size

- easy to use (except as noted below)

- ability to shoot 1080p60

- 8mp still camera, much better than most video cameras, now I don’t need to carry a still camera with me on vacation

Cons:

- highest resolution/frame rate files can’t be played back on my system

- the joystick controller is difficult to push down without it reading as a “set” meaning menus are difficult to navigate

- lack of an input for an external microphone or video light

Still trying to read the fine print
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
The manual is a pain. Very small print and you have to flip back and forth to try and understand what they are trying to tell you. I have lost photos and movies because of this.

Very pleased with this Camcorder
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I first purchased the HD-1000 and I liked it but when this model came out so I switched. They are both basically the same camera, different form factors. I really this one better, and the 1000 had a dock with all the connections, which was a pain if I wanted to play the videos somewhere besides home…plus the FH1 had a slightly larger screen and will sit stand alone better. The only problem I have is that I cannot find a PC that will play the 1080i 60fps videos, they play fine on a TV not on any of my 4 PC’s (one is a DC 2.0 with 4gig RAM) I usually do 720 30 fps anyway.

Slow motion modes (240 and 600 frames/s) limited to 10 seconds
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
I have not used the camera much, but I was disappointed to find that to slow motion modes are limited to 10 seconds. At first I thought my memory card might be too slow, but the manual confirms that you only get 10 seconds at a time in 240 fps and 600 fps modes.

Unimpressive Video Quality overshadows other impressive, competitive features
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
I bought this camera after the positive reviews on “Amazon” & “CamcorderInfo”. Last year I had bought a Sony HDR-SR12 (120GB HD Cam) for $1200 on Amazon and was impressed by its daylight performance. But Sony HDR-SR12 was Mediocre in low lights. Since this camera earned Best reviews for LowLight performance on Camcorderinfo, I went ahead and ordered it on Amazon. When I opened the box at night, I was impressed by its

Small Size, Ergonomics, Low Light Performance, Battery Life. I could carry it in my cycling jacket and stop on the beach trails and shoot video. It can record upto 3 hours of video on single full charge. My Sony HDR-SR12 would die in 80 to 90 minutes i.e. half the battery time.

** However, when I played it back on my HD Monitor the video was not par with HD quality

- The object details are not good. Object contours are blurred. Ex: in a good scenery trees look like a green ball.

- When you zoom (optical) there is lot of shaking i.e. no optical stabilization. And of course how can one shoot videos without zooming.

- Manual Lens Cover – I lost the lens cover…

The whole purpose of owning a HD Camcorder is to have higher detail and real life videos. These days a top notch consumer SD camcorder (for far lesser price) will give you 100% better video than this camera.

Video Quality cannot be compromised.

In my opinion this camcorder though half the price of Sony, Panasonic or Canon is not worth HD or even SD video. It has lot of desired features (long battery, low light sensitivity, small form factor, good controls) but the Video Quality just kills all of them.

** Maybe it is good for you-tube videos or if you travel a lot and worry about quantity rather than quality.

You will be stuck with your Life Moments in mediocre quality. Do you want to make another trip, just to have better videos?? NO.. I cursed myself after making 2 trips with this camera.

Sadly, I have lost its Lens Cover cap (it is not automatic, manual cap) and would not be able to return it.

I am going to up the ante and buy this year’s 2009 Panasonic HD-HS300 currently selling for $1400.

I gifted my Sony HDR-SR12 to my sister last year. The Daylight videos on that camera were sexy. Connect that camera to HDTV and you will be blown away with the colors, sharpness and details.

Own it GREAT for video and pictures at the same time
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This is just a short one,

I own this camera. Love the image quality. TRUE HD and can take a single picture while taking video.

Just be sure your computer can process 1920×1080 HD images. File format works (.MP4) with quicktime, no problems, so can be used on any computer (pc or Apple). This is the one thing I had problems with when I had a Canon FS100. MPEG-2 format, could not view in my iMacs, problems finding a “free” modifier to view in my pc’s and no way to merge video files together. I just wanted a simple file format so it could be put to DVD, viewed in ANY computer and simple like my old Sony 8MM video camera. This is great. Worth the money. I bought it somewhere else and not going into price comparisons but I got it when it first came out too. Now it is NOT water friendly, if you want that, get the Sanyo’s that are. If you want a product that does not have many moving parts (that will break down) and great pictures, this is it. I got the 32 GB Top Ram card from Amazon, CLASS 6 (important on file transfers) and it is great. I can take 2 hours worth of FULL HD video no problems. Use the HDMI plug in and view it from the camera the video on your HD tv, or transfer to your pc/Apple, edit and make a DVD. I recorded in the 240 FPS and the 600 FPS for the slow mo and super slow mo (resolution degrades and you do NOT get sound) but the pictures are great. I recommend this camera.

Great camcorder except image stabilizer
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I have used this camcorder for almost 2 months. I bought it because of the excellent review at camcorderinfo.com for its low light capability. It does produce amazing indoor video, clear, bright, & low noise. Its outdoor video (also excellent) is a little bit over-saturated, but I like it.

The image stabilizer is really bad. But if you shoot something close without zoom, you will be fine. So for indoor shooting, the image stabilizer does not matter. I have a monopod for outdoor shooting.

The menu is easy to use. One feature I like a lot is its built-in function to do video trimming and combining so that I do not have to buy a powerful computer. Several video editing software I tried on my 2-year old computer can not play 1080/60p video smoothly. It is annoying if you try to edit 1080/60p video using these software. So what I did is to use the camcorder to trim videos and then use video editing software to generate DVDs.

I later found out that the included NERO video editing software is actually good enough to produce decent DVDs with menu (it took me quite a few hours to discover the hidden functions). While I always keep the original mp4 files, I want to have DVD that can be played on any standard DVD player. The NERO software generates SD video nicely. Though it down-grades the video resolution to 720×480 (SD), the resulting video is really nice on a 42 screen, way better than that from my SD-camcorder. I guess it requires a consumer-level HD camcorder to generate pro-level SD video.

Remarkable feature-filled, intuitive camera
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
In March 2009, I purchased this: Canon FS100 Flash Memory Camcorder with 37x Optical Zoom (Garnet Wine), so this is my point of comparison.

First of all this camera is very sleek and light. It is hard to believe it can do 1080p this small.

I don’t like the fact that the lens cap must be manually removed and hangs (the Canon is automatic and built-in) and it was difficult to get the string in the cap to keep it attached.

There isn’t an SD card included, so make sure to buy one with it!

It is very intuitive. With sophisticated electronics (e.g., digital cameras, cell phones, etc.), I usually can figure out the basic functions and I review the book to learn the rest. This Sanyo has been very easy to figure out how to use and even edit video.

The button configuration is very simplistic, yet very functional. There are only 6 buttons plus the zoom and they are all arranged well for one-thumb operation. It is so much easier to go between play & record modes and take pictures vs. video on this compared to the Canon.

The quality of video is just terrific. I’ve primarily used 1080p @ 60f/p with a 16GB SDHC card (Transcend 16 GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card TS16GSDHC6E [Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging]) and it showed 2 hours, 10 minutes of video possible, which is great.

The ability to grab any still from a video is amazing. If the video is well-lit and not shaky, the stills look as good as some digital cameras.

As a test for the camera, I recorded some of a once-in-50-year storm this week and captured a half-dozen nice-sized lightning bolts. Going frame-by-frame is just incredible.

The Canon FS100′s photos mode was just awful, it reminded me of a digital camera I had 10 years ago. The Sanyo is very good. I can’t say it is as good as my Canon S2 IS (Canon Powershot S2 IS 5MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom), but some of them looked very good and with 8 megapixels vs. my 5 megapixels. This even has a flash!

I just tested it for the first time today for a short time, but the high speed recording looks very cool. It has a 240 frame per second and 600 fps mode. The 600 fps was very low quality images, but 240 looked reasonable decent quality. I look forward to finding fun things to use that on (maybe the next thunderstorm!).

I was all ready to hook the camera up to my HDTV via HDMI cable, but found it wouldn’t fit into the camera. That’s because of the Mini-HDMI jack in the camera, I learned. I bought this: Mediabridge – 5ft Mini-HDMI to HDMI – Version 1.3 Category 2 – 1080p – Blu-Ray and was delighted by the high-quality video. I also enjoyed the included remote control to show my videos off without being tethered to the camera.

My computer cannot handle the video editing power required, so I found the editing functionality built-in to the camera. It is very easy to use and works great. I was easily able to trim the beginning and end of video and merge multiple videos together into one with all kinds of flexibility and speed.

I’m sure that there are more features I haven’t learned yet, but I’ve been very impressed with everything so far and will be using this as our primary video camera and probably even digital camera in many circumstances.

[UPDATE 11/23/09] Overall, I still really like this camera, although a few annoyances have been the picture quality in low light and a difficulty with colors in some indoor circumstances. Sometimes the colors will changes as the cameras tries to figure out how to shoot.

Great camera
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I have purchased this camera and I love it. It has a lot good features but hte one I like the most is the HD. This unit is very easy to use, it makes a great gift.

Compact HD Video and Still Shooter
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Taking this camera out of the box the first observation is the size. I think this camera is a perfect size for travel, probably the best size for a full HD camera I have seen. Being 4″x2″x2″ means it can easily be held in the palm of my hand.

The first step is to load the battery, which is installed on the bottom of the camera to keep it compact. Make sure you slide the small unlock button to the left before trying to open the battery cover or it will not open and you will think you are forcing it (ask me how I know this).

The next thing to do is load an SD card (don’t forget to order one!) I would suggest a 16GB SD card which will give you about 1.5 hours of recording at the highest resolution. By comparison a 4GB will give you 21 minutes.

When you turn the camera on it will go through the standard steps to program date and time. You will want to set the video resolution and photo resolution next then you are ready to play.

My Observations During Use:

The video quality is very nice, I tried the camera out using the highest resolution and it provides excellent results. I did find that you need to be VERY steady when shooting or your image will be shaky. The image stabilization for this camera is digital, which is less expensive to manufacture but by far inferior to optical stabilization. 90% of what I shoot is wide angle so it isn’t much of a problem but you really need a monopod if you are shooting with the lens zoomed in. Regarding the zoom, I only use optical zoom on any of my electronics because I can’t stand the results of digital zooms but this camera has a unique digital technology that concentrates on a section of the sensor instead the usual method of blowing up the pixels and the results are better then I have seen in the past with digital zooms. It does create a decent and useable picture.

The “Face Chaser” works well in finding faces and kept the camera properly focused when I was shooting family and friends.

The ability and results of shooting in low light with this camera are truly excellent. I was very impressed with indoor, incandescent and even candle light video.

There is a high-speed option on this camera that is very cool for shoot sport shots. You are limited to a 10 second video and it is at a much lower resolution but you can record at 600 frames per second, just amazing! It really makes some fun stop motion stuff to shoot in this mode.

Photo quality is very good and the photos I tested made very sharp prints.

The battery life is EXCELLENT; I shot for over 2 hours and still had plenty of battery life available. The stand by mode works very well at conserving battery power.

Some small bones to pick:

-I would have liked to see a built in lens cap, using the old fashioned type that bounces around and needs to be placed on when not in use is something they should upgrade in the next version.

-There is no external mic option.

-There is no hot shoe on the camera.

I hope to see Sanyo make a few improvements by the time I am ready an upgrade but overall this is a nice camera that I will enjoy for family use and for travel.

Nice little camera…for the price.
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
There are many incredibly detailed reviews already so I will not go into the same level of detail as it would be repetitive. I will give my impressions and thoughts on features and compare this to two other HD cameras I own.

I currently own a top of the line Sony HD camcorder and a JVC 60gb HD camcorder so I can compare certain features between all three cameras. Impressions: The first thing you will notice is how tiny this camcorder is in your hand. It is a super compact camera that could easily fit into a womans large purse. It is significantly smaller than my Sony and slightly smaller than my JVC. One thing I did not like is the fact it does not have a built in lens cover. It has a lens cap similar to a DSLR camera which you have to put on and take off everytime you use it. The other thing you need to be aware of is that this camera records to SD cards but does not come with an SD card. So make sure you budget extra money to buy one or more SD cards and if you are going to be recording in HD you need to get a big card. The advantage of the SD card is that you can pull it out of the camcorder and put it into a card reader on your computer to download the files. The disadvantage is that you have to invest money in SD cards. For this fact alone I would say you might want to consider investing $150 – $200 more and getting a JVC with a 60gb hard drive built in. Overall I feel the quality of this camcorder is good but not quite up to the level of the Sony or JVC…but for the price it is good. The camcorder is easy to use and solidly built.

This camcorder records full HD which is pretty incredible for the price point this is at right now. The video quality is not quite on par with more expensive camcorders but unless you are doing a side by side comparison you will NOT notice a difference as it does look great, although with a little more noise in the picture than the more expensive camcorders. The “super slow motion” option is more a novelty than a useful tool. This is due to the VERY low resolution that is used for the super slow motion. It’s mainly something to just goof around with as opposed to really using it to produce a good video. There are multiple resolution options as you would expect with any camcorder. The options menu is good and fairly intuitive. The software that comes with it is adequate to get the basic job done.

Overall I think this is a good camera when considering the price point. This really is a great option to get started in HD, just don’t expect all the bells and whistles of more expensive cameras. One thing I would say is you may want to consider spending a little more money to get an HD camcorder with a built in hard drive. Just make sure to do your homework. I am giving this camcorder 4 stars due to it’s solid feature set and super low price for an HD camera when compared to other camcorders in this price range. It’s a great way to dip your toe into the HD realm. It is not up to the quality of more expensive cameras but I wouldn’t expect that for such a low price.

Nice Camera Quality if you want removable Media Only
Rating:3 out of 5 stars
I remember back in the day when we had VHS camcorders and the physical media was something that we always had to make room for in our bags. Then came the mini-VHS camcorders where you had to place the tape into a special adapter to play the mini tape in your VHS player. Those days seem like so long ago … but for some reason this camera has some of those archaic qualities not found in our digital age let alone a Hi-Def camcorder.

Some of the features that led me to give this camcorder 3 stars:

Cons:

- Takes removable media only. There is not a smidgeon of hard drive space to be found. If you don’t have a Flash Memory card handy you are out of luck. Keep a lot of them handy. Hi-Def recording will eat a gigabyte quicker than you can say video cassette!

- a removable lens cap. (Who does that any more?). Why didn’t Sanyo build it into the lens like most other cameras out there?

- “Am I recording or not”?? I actually lost a critical piece of recording (a piece of a guitar lesson) thinking that I was recording when I was not. No “pause” symbol whatsoever!. No double-bars, no nothing! You are either recording or you are not recording. YIKES! I ended up recording my toes instead of the Allegrias I thought I was recording from my Flamenco guitar instructor. I’ve seen most other cameras (my two others) use pause actions and symbols and have never seen a camcorder with simply a “record” and “not record” function. Am I being too picky to ask that???? I think of it as a regular convention and I just cannot find it anywhere on this camera.

*** Quote from one of my comments: “Another Con that was discussed – Lack of “Pause” – Nope – Flash based camcorders don’t pause. They don’t need to and never will. There are no moving parts. They simply start and stop instantaneously.”

Pros:

- Small

- Light weight

- Seems solid

- Nice picture quality both from the video and from the 8 megapixel built in camera.

I did not install the manufacturer software since I use a Mac platform and imported the movie straight into iMovie (makes life very easy for Mac users).

I wished I could say more kind things about this camera … but in this general price range I would look for a camera that has both an internal hard drive and a slot for SD cards. It shouldn’t have to be one or the other.

Somehow this camera is a throwback to the future … wanting to be the nostalgic camcorders in the Beta / VHS days and wanting to be in the digital world.

Which are you?

Very Good Dual Camera with an annoying quirk
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I bought this camera after a lot of research into HD camcorders. My personal requirements for the camcorder were:

1. Should take excellent high defition videos

2. Should take good still pictures

3. Should be below 500 dollars

All camera’s in the market failed my criteria one way or the other. Some were expensive, Some took terrible stills while others could were just downright pathetic. I looked real hard at samsung-hmx10c for a while but just as i was about to pull the trigger, it went out of stock. So finally i settled on this little gadget from sanyo.

So now the camera has been with me for the last two months so here goes my experience with it:

Pro’s:

1. The camera takes absolutely stunning videos. The video is so crisp that you shall be amazed.

2. Excellent low light performance meaning beautiful videos indoors. The camera is rated to be the best indoor performer due to its very large image sensor.

3. Excellent still pictures outside in good light and reasonable still pictures inside in low light.

4. At $430 it is the cheapest HD camcorder available in the market. The only camera which takes both excellent videos as well as pictures is canon hfs dual shot and it retails for 1200 dollars!!!!

So now for the Con’s:

1. The camera Image stabilization is absolutely crap meaning you can totally forget about the zoom function because even at moderate zooms the video shakes uncontrollably. This problem also makes it impossible to “walk and record” because the video becomes very very jerky. The problem is so very obvious that even my tech-o-phobe wife was yesterday complaining about it.

2. Slow Auto Focus.

A Solid 4-star camera. Excellent video quality. Would definitely recommend!
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R13KU6HS2MB3A9 The test footage (starts around 2:07 in the video – it was shot hand held) has been HEAVILY compressed and resized from 1920×1080! But hopefully, you can still get a general idea, especially the zoom capability. (the open boxing is obviously from a different camera)

This camera is really easy to use. I did not have to read the manual, it’s really user-friendly, but it’s nice that they include an actual manual book for you! (Funny how when I wish I could use a manual, some manufacturers only include it on a CD!) However I did later read it to understand more about a certain feature; the manual is just as easy to follow.

What I love most about this camera is the ability to set custom shortcuts to the 4 directional buttons on the camera. I love having greater control of the camera, so I set the shortcuts to quickly set manual focus (you can toggle between focuses), focus lock, exposure lock, and exposure compensation. This way, you can really have more quick controls of the camera than using the auto focus.

It’s simple enough, but if you want it more basic/restricted, you can set it to simple mode (not something I would use or care). All you get then is:

video: select between HD and web quality

focus: automatic and macro

flash mode: auto, forced, off

For video options, you can choose from:

* Full-HR 1920×1080 (60 FPS HR) – you better have one powerful computer if you want to edit these files. But for simple cut/join edits, you can do that through the camera of course.

* Full-HD 1920×1080 (60 field/s) – same reasons with above

* Full-SHQ 1920×1080 (30 FPS SHQ) – recommended

* HD-SHQ 1280×720 (30 FPS SHQ)

* TV-SHQ 640×480 (30 FPS SHQ)

* Web-SHR 448×336 (240 FPS SHR) – limited to 10 second-recordings

* Web-UHR 192×108 (600 FPS UHR) – limited to 10 second-recordings

* Voice Memo

For Photos:

* 12m 4000×3000

* 8m-H 3264×2448

* 8m-S 3264×2448

* 6m 3264×1840 (16:9)

* 2m 1920×1080 (16:9)

* 2m 1600×1200

* 0.9m 1280×720 (16:9)

* 0.3m 640×480

* 8m 3264×2448

* 4m 2288×1712

Focal = 5.95-59.5mm 1:2.0-2.8

Filter size: 37mm (this is the size that you need if you want to attach a wider lens)

Some pet peeve:

- In the menu, it shows at the bottom in this order:

(MENU) EXIT (SET) OK

but on the actual buttons, the Set button is on the left and the menu button is on the right, so I think that’s how they should display it on the menu as well.

- I wish the SD card door would just be a slide open mechanism instead or just not have it at all for quick removable. Somewhat annoying to have to open the LCD, which also happens to turn on the camera, just to remove the memory card.

- Even though Sanyo is a Japanese company, ironically, there’s no Japanese in the Language Option.

I also have the TH-1 (720p) model, which is QUITE disappointing compared to this camera, but this one is definitely worth shooting with besides the obvious higher resolution; it performs much better in low lighting (quality is no comparison). On the TH-1, it’s REALLY horrible when you shoot in low lighting. Low lighting is where most HD cameras hurt in quality; it’s definitely not the best, but it’s not the worst either when it comes to shooting in low light with this camera.

The TH-1 model does not warn about not having an SD card inserted (because it has 43MB internal memory so it will show an internal memory icon), but this camera (FH-1) will constantly nag you about it because it has no internal memory. I noticed there are two extra options with this camera versus the TH-1: Photo Wide-D (compromises both dark and bright areas) and Photo Stabilizer

I don’t know if I received a broken remote, but the ON/OFF button did absolutely NOTHING. And yes, I’ve tried holding it for several seconds and from different directions. However, every other button seemed to work.

Unless you hit record, the actual image on the screen is actually not the full sharpness quality; I believe they do this to prolong battery life when you’re still setting up your shot. So it’s better if you don’t always rely on what you’re looking at until you hit record.

If you hold the MENU button while in playback mode, it will get rid of the display text on the screen and just show a seekbar of the video.

If you press the SET button while you’re setting up your shot, it will get rid of all the display text info on the viewing screen; however, there isn’t seem to be a way to get rid of all the info text display once you hit record.

Pros:

- 1080p – excellent video quality. It’s HD!

- I love the 4 button custom shortcuts!

- Compact! (smaller than a soda can) yet has a large 3″ LCD screen and amazing what it can produce despite its size

- Impressive 16x zoom!

- Image stabilizer (not bad… I can see it functioning, although it’s not optical for greater stability)

- Excellent battery life (it’s also nice that it displays the actual approx battery life time left instead of just a generic bar)

- Comes with standard composite(yellow; red/white)+S-video AND component (RGB – HD)

- Comes with a small remote

- It takes photos (definitely usable unlike the photo feature with the TH-1, which was horrible)

- Files play smoothly on PS3! (take SD card out of the camera and use a card reader to it)

- Cut/Join videos within the camera

- Transfer directly to hard drive without a computer with the camera.

- You can create new folders within the camera and set where you want the recording to go to.

- Can fast forward up to 15x and can display 21 video thumbnails (by pressing the zoom out button; default shows 8 thumbnails) that you recorded on the screen

- Can take snapshots frame by frame of recorded video

Cons:

- Not Touch Screen (then again, the 4-direction button control makes it very quick to do everything)

- No automatic lens cover

- No built-in memory

- No external mic

- I wish it would have an option to keep recording even if you close the LCD (it ends up stopping the recording because it automatically goes to standby mode)

- Preset manual focus distances (but at least they have auto focus lock)

- Can’t manual focus once you hit record. (however, you can still focus lock/unlock)

- Tripod stand hole is not centered! (Why do they have to do this?!)

- The set button has somewhat of a cheap feel

Overall, I give this camera a SOLID 4 star rating. (And I am a pretty harsh rater and rarely give 5 stars) I am happy with the quality and the quick access to the manual controls. The price is just right too. I hope they will make a waterproof version of this (I know they have it for 720p). Definitely would recommend. Avoid the TH-1 model (even if you’re on a budget).

Disappointing for the price
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
I have the JVC GZ-HM200 High-Def Camcorder, which is about $100 more than this camcorder, and I also have an old VHS-C Panasonic PV-D209 Palmcorder Camcorder that was about $100 less several years ago, and I would prefer choose this one in last place between those. The JVC camcorder is miles ahead of this one, so make a good investment in that instead of this Sanyo.

There are a few good points: It has a wide range of video modes, uses mp4 video files, and the bundled software is Nero 8 Essentials. There is a huge amount of settings you can modify if desired. You can connect to a TV/Video/HDTV via S-Video, standard RCA video/audio jacks, HDMI, and component video. All cables except the HDMI are included; the Canon HTC-100 Mini-HDMI Cable works well. You only need one cable to connect to any of those outputs; the JVC requires 2 cables to use component video!

You can also use this as a “PC Camera” (webcam) if you have installed either Windows Messenger 5.0+ or MSN Messenger 7.0+.

Now for the disappointments. The image stabilization is horrible. If you zoom at all indoors or other low light situations, even just optical zoom, the video is noticeably shaky. The auto-focus takes 2 or 3 seconds to work, and sometimes doesn’t ever lock in.

The menu structure and buttons are not terribly intuitive and will take a lot of reading and experimenting to do even the simplest of things like turning on the video light. The lens cap is not automatic – it is an old-fashioned cap you have to manually take off and put on. Fortunately it comes on a lanyard to attach to the wrist strap.

The “quick-start” guide is too brief to really get you going. The actual manual is pretty thorough and complete.

Great camcorder, make sure you have a good computer.
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This camcorder has been great so far. The only downside is the higher resolutions will require a powerful computer for playback. The files skipped frames on my P4 3GHz and DualCore 1.87GHz, but play perfectly on my QuadCore 2.33GHz machine. I couldn’t believe how small and light it was. A $30-$35 16GB card will do about 90 minutes of the highest quality video. I recommend three 16GB cards vs. one 32GB card for about the same price. The still cam is not quite as good as my 7.1 MP Canon, but still good, and the ability to take stills while recording is great.

Can not be beat for the price
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
If you are looking for a good video camera for taking home movies of your kids, vacation, etc. this will fit the bill very well. A pro would not even look at this camera. I was lookinjg for a camera that would take good pictures and video, use no tapes or discs, and fit in my pocket. This camera does it all well.

I have used this camera to take about 2 hours of video. So far I am VERY happy with it. The image stabilization is not to bad, but will not compensate for a very shaky hand, but if you are carful, it does the job. I was using it at an amusment park and had very little trouble keeping it steady. My last camera was a 6+lb Sony digital 8. That was easier to keep steady because of the weight, but I’ll take the 12oz Sanyo any day. I replayed the video on my 32″ HD TV. It turned out as crisp and clear as I expected with excelent color and contrast. I could not be happier with the video quality.

I also took quite a few pictures with the Sanyo. It did a prettty good job, but I found it would focus better if I used the single spot focus instead of the multi spot. Once I figured that out, the pictures turned out fine. If I want pictures to blow up past 8×10, I will use my Digital SLR. I did not buy this camera expecting top end quality for photos.

Pros – Small, Small, Small. Very good video. Good quality pictures. Seems to record well on any SDHC card. Many useful features. One of the few times buying electronics, were I felt I got more than I paid for.

Cons – The auto white ballance did not seem to work as well as I would have liked. I found using the presets worked better. I would have liked the ability to set the white ballance as a shortcut. Also the format for pictures is either 4:3 or 16:9. Most computer photo pater is 4×6, so 3:2 ratio. Some trimming will occur when printing 4×6 prints.

Summery – I am very happy with this camera. Even the white ballance issue is minor and easy to get around. The photo format issue is not a big deal either. I would tell anyone to get this camera for taking home movies or photos of your friends or family. For ther price, you can not beat it.

Great Camera, but need a tripod
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
I purchased this camera. It’s great and also cheap. I have only two main concerns, one is the light, in dark conditions the camera record with a lot of noise, and the second is that if you need a clear image, you’ll need a tripod. No matter of that, the camera is great, specially in sun conditions and recording in lanscapes. I recomend this camera a lot.

If someone knows how to avoid noise in dark conditions, I’d appreciate your comments.

Regards,

Miguel

Excelent image, bad stabilization
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
The good:

1) Image quality is excellent. This is the first camera that can record at 1080p/60fps.

2) Excellent low light performance.

3) Great price (half of other comparable cameras)

4) Very small and light.

5) Flash for still pictures.

6) Slow motion feature is nice for playing around.

7) Works as webcam and can be charged via usb.

Easy to play and edit files. This camera produces mp4 files while cameras like Canon and Sony produce a hard to play and edit file.

9) Good battery life. It lasts more than 120 minutes when recording in high resolution.

The bad:

1) Horrible image stabilization. The camera uses a (poorly implemented) electronic image stabilization (EIS) instead of optical image stabilization (OIS). The images are usually very shaky, but this problem can be fixed by using a post-processing (computer based) image stabilization software. I have tested two: Virtualdub with Deshaker (free, lots of controls, not user friendly) and Cyberlink Powerdirector (not free, easy to use, lots of other features). Both options gave me very good results.

2) Manual cover for the lens.

3) Not as many (useless?) features as other high-end cameras.

Highly versatile, quality camera: shoots quality, fluid motion HD well, even in low-light conditions
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The primary reason I purchased this camera was for the 60fps 1080p video recording, and I couldn’t be happier. I can’t express what a difference it makes to have 60fps video instead of 30fps, all without all the horrible annoyances with interlacing.

This camera does 60fps video extremely well, providing VERY high resolution video that is incredibly fluid to watch. Looking at the footage from this camera is like being there.

Bullets are always nice, so here’s a simple list of pros/cons. The biggest takeaways are: It’s a great camcorder, especially for action shots, it’s a good still camera, and the quality and versatility is stunning given the price.

Positives

+Unmatched fluid motion in a camcorder (I don’t know of any other major camcorder that does 1080p60 except the Casio EX-F1)

+EXCELLENT bang-for-the-buck

+Good low-light performance

+Awesome slow-motion capability

+Fully automatic mode supported along with Shutter priority, Aperture priority, and full Manual.

+Macro mode is very good

+Zoom is very good

+Videos shot with Slow-mo + macro or Slow-mo + zoom are awesome

+Still photos are very good

+You can take still photos *while recording a video*

+If you’re not recording a video, a good flash is enabled for good stills

+On-camera editing is pretty good

+The camera is SMALL and LIGHT, amazingly so.

+Transferring the videos to a computer is trivial, it just connects as a flash drive with .MP4 files that play on any computer running Windows 7, any Mac, or any Pre-7 computer with Quicktime or DivX.

+Videos can be uploaded directly to YouTube from the camera, in HD.

Negatives

-Image stabilization is not very robust. This might be a problem for some people.

-No Line-in for an external mic

General Advice for cameras/HD:

+Interlacing is never your friend, avoid it if you can. It just complicates things, especially if you’re using the video with a computer.

+Cameras have a tough time in the dark, no matter how you slice it. This does quite well relative to the competition.

+Don’t be fooled by sharpening, on your HDTV or on you camera. It’s especially important on cameras to turn the sharpening off as the compression algorithms used by cameras are designed for actual video content, not artificially sharpened video content. Whenever possible shoose the ‘Soft’ or ‘Normal’ setting available on a TV or camera. Your videos will look much truer to life.

Loses 10 seconds of video every 22 minutes
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
As others have pointed out, the Sanyo VPC-FH1 (and VPC-HD2000) will lose about 10 seconds of video every 22 minutes (or so) when the file size hits the 4Gb limit for the FAT filesystem. At this point, the camera opens a new file and loses about 10 seconds of video in the process.

Other camcorders (Canon, Sony, etc.) don’t seem to exhibit this issue. One way manufacturers work around the issue is to buffer the video input during the switch over so that no frames are lost. I’m assuming that, given the price, Sanyo had to cut corners here.

I like to set up my camcorder on a tripod and just let it run for the length of an event. If I’m filming a recital, for example, I don’t want random 10 second chunks missing. For me, this is a deal breaker.

Great camera for its price range, can’t go wrong
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
After having played with Canon, Sony and Panasonic camcorders over the years, I was expecting to find this little camera lacking in something. I was expecting bad image quality, terrible battery life, confusing menus…something glaring enough that it would contrast sharply against cameras two to three times the price.

I didn’t really find anything, though. If anything, I realized it was the other cameras that were lacking some features. Here are my favorite things about the camera.

Firstly, the image quality is fantastic for such a small and inexpensive camera. I never did a calibrated test against my other HD cameras, but eyeballing it, the colors were very clear and true, and the sharpness and quality of the image was great. It’s not a big-budget hollywood camera, obviously, but I would definitely take this on vacation with me.

The different resolution and framerate options give you a lot of flexibility in what you want to shoot. The 240fps mode isnt in HD, but its good enough to post videos on youtube or share with family, and some of the footage you get is enlightening and/or hilarious. The 600fps mode, for the most part, is too low resolution to be useful for anything. Definitely fun to play with though. The 720p30 mode gives excellent video quality and will let you record many hours on a 16GB SD card. The full 1080p60 mode gives you far less video per gigabyte, but gives you enormous resolution and the ability to slow the action by half without sacrificing smoothness of the movement. Definite creative possibilities there.

Being able to connect directly to the computer as a webcam is a nice feature not offered on many more expensive cameras. It was obvious Sanyo wanted this camera to be able to do everything the average consumer wished for, and for the most part, they nailed it.

Now for the drawbacks.

As many have mentioned the image stabilization is not very good. It’s not physically stabilized like the higher end consumer cameras (Canon HV40 or HFS10, both of which I own), but actually crops the image and uses an algorithm to move the crop window to make it appear stabilized. It works for minor shaking when fully zoomed out, but any major shaking or being zoomed in will make the limits of this soft IS apparent.

Tip: Turn off IS altogether and use VirtualDubMod with the Deshaker plugin (google it) for amazing software stabilization of the image.

The MP4 codec the camera uses doesn’t seem to be too friendly with some editing packages, yet. But after dealing with Canon’s AVCHD, it’s not nearly that bad. You may need to download and install some codecs or use a program to convert MP4 to AVI or some other intermediate format if you want to do serious editing.

The LCD screen is of pretty poor resolution for an HD camera. It is about the same as my old SD camera from 2003. It works fine for SD but with the added detail of HD video, it’d be nice to be able to see that on screen (especially for focusing purposes).

The tripod mount location is not under the camera’s center of gravity. This makes it annoying to mount on certain stabilized platforms, but every camera seems to do this now. Argh.

There are many things that make this camera stand out, far more than holds it back, these were just the most important to me personally. I wouldn’t hesitate to use this camera for home or vacation videos, and I would definitely employ it for “action” shots for larger productions. Put this camera on a Panavise suction mount and stick it on the outside of your car for some fun shots.

Superb 1080p Picture Quality
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I purchased my Sanyo FH1 in June 2009. My first use of the FH1 resulted in three hours of video when my family and I went on vacation. I set my FH1 video recording mode to the highest quality setting possible (FULL-HR which is 60fps). This is 1080p.

When I returned home I immediately hooked up the FH1 to my Sony Bravia HD 1080i TV via the HDMI connections on both units.

On the FH1 I brought up `OPTION MENU 3′ and selected the `TV OUTPUT’ menu item. The `TV OUTPUT’ menu item allows you to select various settings that describe the type of connection you want to make. I wanted to make a connection that says I want to view a 1080p recording. So, I selected from the list of choices within the `TV OUTPUT’ menu the following settings: `HDMI’ set to 1080p and `COMPONENT’ set to 1080p.

The above `1080p’ settings did not work. This was my error. My FH1 did record in `1080p’ mode (the aforementioned recording quality of `FULL-HR’). However, my Sony Bravia which is 4 years old does not have `1080p’ capability so I had to adjust both settings (HDMI and COMPONENT) to `1080i’.

I then watched my first video from the FH1. The picture quality was stunning! It was akin to watching Sunrise Earth in terms of the clarity of the picture. I was finally watching a video produced from a camcorder that could deliver the picture quality I had always yearned for. Previously, I had owned camcorders whose technology was out of date – it was not the fault of the camcorders – it’s just that technology had moved on. With the purchase of the FH1 I `caught up’.

I place picture quality as my number one criteria for selecting a camcorder. All other considerations place a distant second. Hence, I selected the FH1 for its 1080p capability.

Aside from the outstanding picture quality I found the FH1 easy to operate and the menu screens were simple and straightforward. I did have a bit of a problem when I connected (via the USB cable provided) the FH1 to my computer for uploading and editing. The FH1 `USB CONNECTION’ menu selections confused me. The correct settings are, `COMPUTER’ and `CARD READER’.

The `card reader’ setting is what threw me. I guess the FH1 is in a sense a `card reader’ when you are just uploading video to your computer. I used this same setting when I actually used my Dynex card reader to upload video.

A major concern I had about purchasing a new camcorder that records in 1080p is will I be able to use my movie editing software and will my computer have the processing power to handle it.

I have a Mac Pro using Mac OS X version 10.5.7. The processor is a 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 2GB of memory. I am using iMovie version 8.0.3 for my movie editing software.

I uploaded 3 hours of 1080p video to my Mac. This took approximately 3 to four hours (not sure since I did not sit in front of my Mac while this was underway so I don’t have exact times). I had selected the iMovie import option of `IMPORT FROM CAMERA’. Once the import to my Mac was completed I took a look at my video via iMovie. All of the clips were truncated by 50% (i.e., if a clip was 60 seconds long only the first 30 seconds were imported).

The solution to the clip truncation problem was the selection of a different import option that is available within iMovie. That import option is `MOVIES…’. Use that option and all your video clips will be fully imported. I have much more detail on the specifics of this in the Apple discussion forum on iMovie ’09 under the issue of clip truncation. The point is, the problem was resolved.

Once the video was `fully’ uploaded (no clip truncation) I edited the movie down to around 90 minutes, added transitions, adjusted track volumes, moved clips around and so on and so forth. iMovie had no problems with the editing process and my Mac was responsive – no sluggishness at all. Playback was smooth and the picture was crystal clear on my Mac’s monitor (which happens to be a Dell monitor).

Wherever the picture was not clear it was due to poor lighting and/or poor technique on my part. Camcorders just don’t do well in poor lighting situations and for the most part I am taking daytime outdoor videos anyway. If the lighting is good indoors then you should see video quality commensurate with that level of light. Poor light – poor videos, good light – good videos. It’s that simple.

I am now ready to export my movie to a DVD. I used iDVD to accomplish this and I set the recording mode within iDVD to its highest possible quality setting. It took around an hour and 15 minutes to write out a 90 minute DVD. I popped the DVD into my Pioneer DVD player and experienced a very high quality picture although it is not 1080i or 1080p quality. Nonetheless, the resultant picture quality is a vast improvement from videos I have taken with my older camcorders.

I plan on purchasing a Blu-Ray disc writer and Roxio Toast software (guides you through the Blu-Ray disc burning process) to produce compatible Blu-Ray movies. I have a PS3 so I already have a Blu-Ray disc `reader’. Note: Blu-Ray players cannot play 1080p discs so before exporting your video you must convert it from 1080p to 1080i. There is free software that can do this for you.

If you don’t want to spend the money to go the Blu-Ray route I believe you will still be happy with the picture produced through the `normal’ DVD disc burning process. If you don’t want to lose any picture quality and you don’t want to go the Blu-Ray route you have other options such as playing your movie directly from your computer.

The FH1 does come with software called Xacti Library. In their documentation they write that this is software that allows you to, “save files stored in your camcorder’s card to a large-capacity hard disk – all without using a computer”.

From the large-capacity hard disk their software will allow you to play back your video on your TV without losing any picture quality – full 1080p (f you recorded in 1080p and your TV is 1080p capable). The drawback to this is that your video is unedited and is simply the raw footage that you took. I have not tried out this feature and not sure I will since I want my videos to go through the editing process.

The FH1 can also take photos but I have a Nikon D70 camera for that. I have not nor do I expect to use the FH1′s picture taking capability so I have no input on this aspect of the FH1′s performance. If you want great photos my suggestion is that you get a camera.

The FH1 is a fantastic camcorder that delivers a brilliant 1080p video. It’s price is amazingly low for such a high quality camcorder that can also take photos! It uses flash card media vs. a hard disk drive or internal memory.

The hard disk drive camcorders have moving parts whereas the flash card and internal memory camcorders are solid state. Stay away from the hard drive camcorders – too susceptible to malfunction when bumped or dropped or even with just normal use.

great little camera, still picture quality is OK
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
so I got to review this product through Amazon Vine program, first impression is how small the camera is. It is very light and feels pretty solid. The screen is large, maybe not the best LCD out there but it works well. Almost no buttons so for someone who is looking for a simple to use camera this could be it. You have a lot of different quality settings for the movie mode. HD, 30fps, HD 60fps, web, VGA, etc. still trying to see which one works best when it comes to the HD mode. The battery is located on the bottom of the camera, the SD card slot is on the side, you have to open the screen to access it. There is a flash below the lens and the zoom is pretty powerful. Forget the digital zoom, x160 gets really noisy (duh). This is advertised as a dual camera (movies and stills), however I am not too impressed with the 8MP pictures, they are good but look very “digital”, not very natural. I have been comparing it to the Canon Powershot SX1 (see my review) which is 10MP and has 20x zoom and full HD movie shooting for $100 (I think Canon is a better choice than Sanyo). But if you are looking for a small camera to carry everywhere, that allows you to shoot HD movies on SD cards and decent stills, it is still a good camera, however I would hope the price will go below $400 to make it really interesting.

Versatile high definition camcorder
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
The Sanyo VPC-FH1 HD is the full HD version of the VPC-TH1 HD. It supports the following video modes: 1980×1080@60fps (1080p). 60 fields ps (1080i), 30 fps; 1280×720@30fps (720p); 640×480@30fps (SD), 448×336@240fps, 192×108@600fps (1/10 slow motion)

The lens provides a 10x zoom in still mode and 16x zoom in video mode, 35mm equivalents of 35.7-357mm and 41.7-666.9mm, respectively.

The layout of the VPC-FH1 is practically identical to that of the VPC-TH1: same crisp flip-out widescreen LCD monitor, same logically organized controls at the back (4 buttons: still, movie, rec/play, menu, and a mini-joystick). The zoom control is located at the top of the camera, and you will find a flash below the lens (for still pictures only). The underside features a standard tripod screw mount and the battery compartment.

Flipping open the monitor reveals the SD card slot, connectors for USB, Component/AV and HDMI, and the on/off switch. When the camera is on, closing the monitor puts it in stand-by; flip open the monitor and the camera is ready to shoot in about 4 seconds.

The controls are very simple, and anybody vaguely familiar with the operation of a camcorder can learn how to use it in a few minutes. However, all automatic features can be turned off or controlled via extensive menus, and the power user will delight in the plethora of available settings. The best feature, inherited from SLR cameras, is the capability to assign custom shortcuts to the mini-joystick so that you can access your 4 favorite features quickly while shooting without having to wade through menus.

CONS

—-

- No docking station

- No external charger; you charge the battery by plugging the power adapter into the camera (an external charger is available at extra cost)

- No external microphone connector

- Widest angle not quite wide enough (43mm equivalent) but that’s a common problem with camcorders

- Electronic image stabilization is unconvincing

- Bundled software Windows only (but camcorder is fully supported by OSX’s iLife)

PROS

—-

- Full 1080p 60fps HD

- Supports 720p

- Simple to operate but feature-rich

- Excellent performance even in low light

- Good still camera resolution

- “Face Chaser”

- Fast, efficient autofocus

- Uses standard encoding format usable on computers without conversion

- Built-in simple video editing allows in-camera trimming and joining

- Lens thread allowing the use of accessories, such as the 0.7x VCP-L07W1U wide angle, 0.4x VCP-L04SWU super wide angle and 1.5x VCP-L15TU tele

CONCLUSION

———-

This inexpensive 1080p camcorder offers quite a lot of bang for the buck. Its low light performance is particularly impressive. If it offered a wider angle and optical image stabilization, I would definitely give it 5 stars. As it is, it’s a solid performer that can certainly hold its own compared to similarly priced Canons and Sonys. Recommended, but make sure you buy a tripod!

A real price/performance bargain
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Pros:

1. For day-to-day baby-chasing video shooting, I gave up on Canon HF S10/S100 because I can’t justify additional hundreds of dollars for features I might not need at all (plus, I am Nikonian, want to save money to buy some other Nikon gears).

2. Love the manual control and “shortcuts” feature, I can customize my settings with those shortcuts and it gives me instant access to features I use the most.

3. One nice feature I like about VPC-FH1 is that you can playback clips from USB hard drive connecting to the unit. And, you can offload clipss without using PC. So, I contributed to our economy by getting a 1TB RAID1 USB disk…:) Point is, you also need to think of your storage and redundancy strategy otherwise you WILL lose your data someday.

4. Wife doesn’t object the size and functions of this unit, so this purchase is justified…:)

5. 240fps and 600fps shooting mode are interesting. Although there is 10 second limitation, but, personally I think 10 seconds is long enough to shoot something that requires high speed camera anyway.

Cons:

1. Image stabilization is weak (non-existent I should say), which means you need to avoid moving the camera too quickly.

2. Editing 1080p@60fps is the real challenge.

First, I will continue contribute to our economy by upgrading my PC…:)

Second, software that can read 1080p@60fps is probably just the bundled Nero stuff, which is quite limited. With the camera I also got the Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0b, and I followed the instructions from http://www.vimeo.com/4141962, maybe it’s the software, but I keep crashing it the first try. After a few days I tried the same trick again and I’ve been able to import 1080p@60fps clips into Sony Vegas.

Great picture, good stabilization would make it much better
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This camcorder has almost everything, HD, small form factor, good storage capacity. Its just missing improved imaged stabilization to make it a top choice. It takes very steady hands to avoid getting a shaky picture and a tripod is a good investment with this one. Focussing is also a bit slow. The software is decent but not great. Some minor incompatibilities when trying to play back raw video files without using the software are an annoyance. For the price its a good deal but it could be worth it to spend more and get better stabilization

Excellent HD Camcorder
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The Sanyo VPC-FH1 HD Camcorder is a top notch piece of equipment. The size is wonderful for travel and for this price point, it would be hard to beat this unit. It lacks a couple of features, but the quality and performance more than make up for a few downsides.

I love the size of this camcorder. It is very easy to pop in a bag or carry around with you in your hand. Even though it has a small impact in terms of size, the LCD does not suffer. I was impressed by the size of the screen. Overall, the camcorder seems to be very steady and well-built. Another great feature is the startup time. The VPC-FH1 is ready in a snap after powering it up.

Quality, in both video and still shots, is pretty awesome. At 1080p and 60fps, the video is great and does not disappoint. Throw in the ability to do 8MP photos and you have a great package. The digital photos don’t compare to a DSLR, but it can beat out most mid-range point and shoot cameras. It also packs in 10x optical zoom, which is sufficient for most users and for the size of this camcorder. It seems to perform pretty well in low light conditions, as well. The controls and menus are easy to follow and use, and the battery life is on par with similar camcorder models I have used in the past.

My one complaint would be image stabilization, but I can’t complain too much. It does a decent job, but after using Canon cameras and camcorders I’m spoiled. You might also miss the ability to connect an external microphone, but I don’t consider that to be a decision maker in this instance. In this price point and model range, it would be hard to find a camcorder that performs better.

Great video and pictures in a compact size.
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I was lucky enough to receive this on Thursday and able to use it over the Easter holiday. I made several test videos and pictures to check out all the features before using it on Easter get-togethers. I strongly recommend buying this a couple weeks before using it on big events so you can test out features and set it up to get expected results. It’s a great point and shoot camera/camcorder as long as you know what you’re doing. It’s not much bigger than a computer mouse and fits easily in a clip case. It came with a component video, S. video, mini USB and mini USB adapter (for the hard drive). It did not include a mini HDMI cable.

For the Easter recordings, I used it in the full HD mode 60fps with noise reduction on because it produced the best video on a true HD television when checking out the test files. The quality is extremely good. as good as and in many cases better than actual HD TV programs. A nice feature is being able to take still pictures from video by playing it back and pausing on the frame you want. The still pictures from the video files were very clear and plenty good for printing. The still photos were all done in the eight megapixel mode with excellent results. It was easy to switch between recording video and taking snapshots. I took a few snapshots while recording video and everything worked OK but the picture quality of the snapshot wasn’t that much better than taking a frame snapshot from the video during playback.

I tried a few of the features but haven’t had a chance to really analyze them in detail. The image stabilization feature has its limits shooting video. It does a good job when zoomed out, but you’ll need a tripod when zooming in halfway or more. When zoomed in, it’s hard to hold the camera steady enough for the stabilization feature to work. It is very important to hold the camera steady except if purposely panning. When the camera jerks, it causes the entire image to move which causes the MPEG-4 compression algorithm to create a whole new picture instead of just the small portion of actual action. This comes across as sort of a strobe effect on a large high definition TV.

The standby mode works great. When you’re finished shooting, just close the display. When you’re ready to record again, just open the display and it will be ready before you can remove the dust cover. The face chaser had a hard time locking in on more than two or three faces. This might be because nobody was standing still for a very long period of time. When it did lock in it seemed to be good at correcting. This will need more experimenting.

The display brightness was good and adjusts well between direct sunlight and indoors.

A useful feature is the ability to edit and merge video files right on the camera without the use of a computer. You can also connect the camera to a hard drive without a computer. The downside is that the drive has to be formatted to fat 32 and can’t be over 1 TB. File transfer is very easy on any computer with a USB 2 connection.