Sanyo VPC-FH1 Questions

[Thomas Lowe]

Is it possible to record from the HDMI port of the Sanyo VPC-FH1?

Anyone have any comments about this camera? I was thinking of picking one up to use as a crash cam for river rafting footage, etc. But I want to know if the footage will really hold up at 1080p?

thanks!

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Thomas Lowe

Is it possible to record from the HDMI port of the Sanyo VPC-FH1?

Kind of. From what I understand, the HDMI shuts down when you're shooting... not sure if you can keep it enabled. It's active when not shooting, so as long as power-down mode is off, presumably you could use this as a camera only. The format of the HDMI out (1080i, 1080p, etc) can be set independently of the video mode, at least according to the menus (haven't tried this myself).

Originally Posted by Thomas Lowe

Anyone have any comments about this camera? I was thinking of picking one up to use as a crash cam for river rafting footage, etc. But I want to know if the footage will really hold up at 1080p?

It certainly depends on what you're shooting, but I think the 1080/60p is surprisingly good. I've been shooting high school soccer matches with it, and I'm pretty happy with the results. The AVC encoding is definitely better than that of AVC models from a year or two ago... sure, you can find artifacts if you look for them, but it's on par with HDV. Sanyo does seem to be employing a selective blur/low-pass-filter... I've got a few scenes with really fast panning past complex backgrounds, which should totally result in crazy macroblocking... instead, it gets fuzzy, with little to no obvious macroblocks exposed. Looks questionable sitting in my video editor screen, but you don't notice this as much as you would bad macroblocking in the final video.

Of course, "final video" is something of a question -- just what do you do with 1080/60p on delivery? If nothing else, I get to decide about whether I want to make web videos (without the de-interlacing artifacts you get from HDV), Blu-Ray at 1080/60i, 1080/30p, 720/60p, etc.

For a $400 camera, the FH1 is a great thing. It's hardly perfect, but it's my choice for sports right now. And it does fit in a coat pocket.