Sanyo VPC-CG20 High Definition Camcorder & 10 MP Camera (Black)
by SANYO
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Customers in the UK,
buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: SANYOModel: VPC-CG20
Product features:
- Full HD 1080, 60i Video (1920 x 1080)
- 10MP Photos
- 5x Optical Zoom (Photo and Video)
- 2.7-inch Wide LCD Monitor for HD Playback
- Video and Photo Image Stabilizer
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Sanyo VPC-CG20 High Definition Camcorder & 10 MP Camera (Black)
Customer Review: Does what I want perfectly
Summary: 5 Stars
This Sanyo video camera does exactly what I want it to so I'm very satisfied. It's a video cam with the ability to take stills although I would reserve that function for times when you forgot your real digital still camera. Despite what the description under the photo of this product says, it's supposed to take 14MP stills. While the stills are quite good by some people's standards and far better than a cell phone, I can do better with a 7 or 8MP digital still cam with a high quality lens. I'm not talking about a pro level DSLR with removable lens but any Panasonic point & shoot with a Leica 3X or 4X permanent lens.
I don't know why but video cams taking stills never look quite right. The pixels may be there but there's something odd about the resulting pix. Maybe it's small diameter digital zoom, or small sensor diameter, but there's just something that looks "video" about stills taken with a video cam even though the sensor should be similar or identical. I assume this isn't a problem for the opposite - videos taken by a still cam. But I just didn't want a still camera that large for my video purposes. I have a DSLR Panasonic and two Panasonic digital point & shoots that give exceptional pro-quality results but I wanted a tiny 1080p video cam for my shirt or jacket pocket with no moving parts to replace my larger "old" digital-8 palm-sized video cam.
We recently went to a Christmas lights display at a large metropolitan zoo. My wife took her Panasonic 7MP pocket 4X zoom snapshot cam with image stabilizer and Leica lens. I took the new Sanyo video to shoot our 4 month old baby and see what it could do at night - which is kind of a video torture test.
Using it's factory settings the Sanyo would be terrible at night but there is a low-light choice in one of the menus. Some of the video came out pretty nice from a distance (if you're careful about L/R sweeps which causes blur in low light). Within 20 feet the system was sometimes confused by bright tree limb light bulbs and the darkness between the bulbs. Focus was iffy sometimes, lights blurred or had halo glow around them sometimes but not other times, and auto exposure varied between okay to terrible when my wife was backlit by lighted trees. The "face finder" feature wouldn't work at all in these situations. There's no video fill light on the Sanyo so I didn't expect much. This is an extreme abuse of the exposure system so I didn't expect it to turn out as well as it did. We'll have the video shorts as memories even if they aren't very good. This Sanyo does pretty good video in our living room during the day when some sunshine is helping our lamps illuminate. It records indoors at night with just basic living room lighting although the video is grainy from high-gain. That's just the way it goes with any video cam.
The Sanyo excels for outdoor video shooting - which is awesome. I have taken video shorts rivaling broadcast quality which makes me very happy for when our baby becomes a toddler. I had read that image stabilization causes fuzziness in still photos but never saw it in my Panasonic still cams. But when I play my indoor Sanyo videos or stills through my 52" Samsung LCD TV using the built-in HDMI port, I can see a slight lack of clarity - I assume it's the MP4 compression or the image stabilization method used on the digital zoom. I want to look into that further and try shooting with and without image stabilization. I've got video and still resolutions set up for their max. I have become spoiled by the incredible clarity of Blu Ray disks and regular DVDs pushed to 1080i via upverting on my LCD TV. The 1080p FullHD output of the Sanyo video cam so far isn't as crisp as those disk formats but is certainly better than 720p or the ancient 240 lines of old style video cams.
All in all, I highly recommend this unit for what it is intended to do - very good, noise-free, outdoor or well-lit digital video in a compact package using flash memory card. I am a firm believer that every device is maximized to do one thing well and usually can only do other things mediocre. That's the case with any video cam I've ever seen with still photo ability. This one is no different. It's built well, the buttons and switches seem to be as durable as anything else on the market, the LCD screen is very clear and bright, and it has many features packed into a tiny package. You don't realize how tiny until you hold it or slip it in a pocket.
Features I really like are: extremely small size and weight, flip open LCD screen that can reverse and face the front for recording yourself, removable SDHC cards with huge capacity (make sure you buy CLASS 6 cards or higher), built-in flash for still photos, multiple face recognition for proper exposure, low-light high-gain mode, built in speaker for hearing audio of video playback, replaceable rechargeable lithium-ion battery and available off-brand extra ones for $8 each, a separate powerful MP4 encoding chip allowing 1080P at 60FPS recording (which is known as FullHD) which most consumer video cams can't do (1080P at 30FPS only), well placed buttons once you get accustomed to what they do, several "function programmable" button positions (like macros on a PC), stereo mics on the front of the flip-open LCD viewfinder screen, easy battery exchanging on the side, tripod mount amazingly squeezed onto the bottom edge, mini-HDMI port and USB port available.
Things I don't care for: pull-out cover door for access to the SDHC card slot, rectangular lens that doesn't allow a round screw-on UV haze filter for protection, lens cap that hangs from a string and must be turned upside down to use it (an irritant not a defect), shiny black finish that shows all finger prints, you can accidentally push the power button while holding the camera like a pistol in one hand with the viewfinder screen open because it isn't recessed, still shots in mediocre light seem to take forever to shoot as though the exposure system is thinking although the resulting exposure level is much better than existing light was - if your subject will stay still that long.
The only thing whacky to me is that you don't get an instruction manual with it so you have to connect the cam to a USB port of your online computer and when you turn it on the first time the cam takes control to send you to the Sanyo website where you download and print the operation manual from a PDF file. You can also download a Sanyo photo dump program there which pulls your data from the cam into your PC via USB. I didn't download that because I use a flash card reader that came with my 16GB SDHC card.
If you're a video hobbyist hoping to shoot clean high-res video shorts of yourself, your friends, your family, your babies, and other fun well-lit video experiences, I can't imagine there's anything better at this point in a super-compact shirt-pocket package for those purposes.
Description of Sanyo VPC-CG20 High Definition Camcorder & 10 MP Camera (Black)
Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG20 Digital Camcorder VPC-CG20BK CamcordersCamcorders
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