Sanyo’s latest offering in their palm-sized digital video camcorder Xacti line will be the CA8 and seems to include almost everything a camcorder freak could want–almost. The Xacti CA8 camcorder–how do we love thee? Let us count the ways! Well, for starters, you are tiny–you fit in the palm of my hand like all of my favorite gizmos. Next, you are waterproof. That’s right, waterproof–not water resistant, but air-tight down to 1.5 meters beneath the water’s surface. That means you can shoot video to a depth of about five feet and still come back with footage. Not bad, right?
You’ve got a 5x optical zoom–which isn’t amazing, but perfectly reasonable. You have an 8 megapixel CMOS that is certainly nothing to sneeze at–though not exactly mind-blowing. (Read more about CMOS vs. CCD, the other kind of camera sensor). You can shoot mp4 format video files using the AVC/H.264 codec which is all the rage, these days, and you can do it at 60 frames-per-second, which is actually pretty gosh-darn impressive.
There is, however, one thing you can’t do–and really, it’s something you should be able to do.
What is it? HD. Why can’t you do Hi-Def? Sure, you can do all those things in VGA (640×480 resolution!) which is really kinda pitiful, but almost every new camera these days is HD–is 720 lines that hard to pull off?
Come on, Sanyo, why do you have to treat your cams and your fans this way?
Waterproof? 5x optical zoom in the palm of your hand? Some of your other Xacti cameras shoot in HD, so why not this one? You even have the CA8 record directly to SDHC card–which is great, because SDHC slots are everywhere these days and on all manner of devices, too. But no HD for CA8.
Well, if you (the reader) want to learn more about this little waterproof cam, you can head over to Sanyo’s press release for the “active Xacti” DMX-CA8 or point your browser at AkihabaraNews.com where they have a review of the Sanyo Xacti CA8. Of course, if you’re just jonesing for the waterproof-part of this camera-equation, you can already pick up Sanyo’s 6 megapixel Xacti VPC-E1. The CA8 won’t be available for another month and only in Japan.
