Michael Oryl gets up close and personal with Sanyo's new tapeless camcorder at the Consumer Electronics Show: is 4 Megapixels and all Flash enough to make the VPC-C4 pixel perfect?
Last year Fisher released a novel looking digital camera-corder in the form of the FVD-C1. It shot still photos and recorded video using its 3.2 megapixel sensor. Here at CES 2005 in Las Vegas, Sanyo is showing an updated version of the device with a new 4 megapixel sensor. They also decided to take credit for the device by dropping the Fisher name.
The new device, the equally cumbersome named VPC-C4, shoots MPEG-4 videos and 4 megapixel native still photos that it stores on a SD memory card. The VPC-C4 also has an 8 megapixel interpolated still photo mode that Sanyo claims will allow users to make larger sized prints while maintaining image quality.
While not having a form factor typical for a digital camera, the VPC-C4 looks very much like a normal, if small, video recorder. The 1.8" transflective TFT display flips out and rotates into position, and from that point forward all camera and camcorder functions can be controled with your thumb. It was quite comfortable to hold, and the interface was reasonably intuitive.
 | | Sanyo VPC-C4 |
One of the interesting features of the VPC-C4 is that you can shoot still photos even while recording video. A quick thumb press starts the video recording function, and at any time you can press the camera shutter button to take a 4 megapixel still photo. The Camera immediately goes back into video recording mode without any further user intervention. Upon playback we did see a delay in the video where the still photo had been shot, so it isn't 100% seamless. 48kHz stereo AAC audio recording lets you hear the recorded event just the way it sounded when it happened.
Apart from that, the VPC-C4 has a number of other noteworthy features, including a very nice 5.8x optical zoom with a reasonably fast f3.5 maximum aperture. The optical zoom effect can be combined with a 10x digital zoom for nearly 60x worth of zooming power. The camera has a 5 point auto focusing system with a macro mode that allows close focusing to within about 2cm.
You can record about an hour's worth of MPEG-4 video at VGA (640x480) resolution on a 1GB SD memory card (not included). There is a built-in flash for poor lighting conditions and even a talking navigation guide for newbies. A multi-purpose docking station that supports remote control via IR is included, and the entire system can connect to your desktop computer through a speedy USB 2.0 interface.
The VPC-C4 weighs about 179 g or 6.3 oz with the included lithium battery and a SD card in place. While the unit we used was a pre-production model with specifications not quite carved in stone, Sanyo officials did say that they expect the VPC-C4 to be available some time in the first half of 2005 at a price point similar to the current Fisher FVD-C1 device that it replaces.
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