Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1000

Just over a year ago, Sanyos first HD (high definition) Xacti video camera stormed our Group Test of digital camcorders by offering fantastic pictures in a 720p format. A year later and the latest model in the range has been made available. Its cheaper, but goes up to 1080i-quality HD the full monty at 60 frames per second, meaning that your home movies really can be as clear and as high resolution as the best television programmes. Features: As well as its ability to capture full HD video, the camera is highly featured too. Its pistol-style grip feels natural and comfortable, with a crisp widescreen viewer through which you can see the action as it occurs. It has a 10x optical zoom, or you can boost it to 100x digitally, and you can, of course, drop the resolution and frame rate if you want to fit more than 10mins per GB onto your memory cards. It comes with all the cables youll need in the box, including a handy HDMI option for piping the best results to your HD television. Performance: We squeezed about 10 minutes of full HD video onto a 1GB memory card, so you might want to consider getting some larger capacity cards and having a few in reserve so you can use the camera to its full potential. Videos played back well through the camera and HDMI-cable combo, offering great picture quality. However, youll need a powerful PC and HD/MPEG-4 compatible video-editing software if you want to do anything useful with your footage. Even if you can edit your film, youll probably need to copy files back to a memory card and play them through the camera, unless youre willing to kit yourself out with the extra equipment needed to burn HD-quality disks that you can then play back through a compatible DVD player. Ease of Use: Despite its technological prowess, theres nothing complicated about using this point-and-shoot camera. Most of the functions youll need sit just under your thumb as you hold the camera, and all the other functions that youre less likely to use while filming are accessible through a simple on-screen menu. The device comes with a dock for charging, connecting to a PC and connecting to your HD television the only problem that will crop up is if your PC and TV arent in the same room. Value for money: If youre not looking for HD recording you can get a decent digital video camera that saves footage to memory cards for significantly less than this. Having said that, Sanyo has done a lot of work on both improving its technology and decreasing the price of its HD cameras over the last year, making this quite good value for those looking to get high quality. Frankly, theres never a great time to buy cameras are getting cheaper and quality is improving with every generation, but youve got to take the plunge at some point.