With the HD1000, Sanyo finally takes the Xacti range to the next level! Even though the dimensions have increased, it remains a compact and very practical product. Now let’s see if it’s worth your money.

Hands on
Very close to what your “average” Xacti looks like, the HD1000 will simply require bigger pockets. The weight excess isn’t a handicap as it provides additional stability. All in all it’s very good even though we’ve now come pretty far from the discretion of a CG65.

Video
Big boost in quality here as you would expect thanks to the High Definition, Sanyo’s HD1000 can now proudly compete with big names such as the Panasonic SD9 and the Victor (JVC) HD6. The image is very clean, and the brightness is pretty high (from F1.8 in wide to F2.5 in max zoom !).

Modles 720p and 1080i are available, but you may want to pick the Progressive over the Interlaced for various reasons. First off the 720p is more than enough and gives you the opportunity to do more than just web videos. Then comes the quality, better and lighter in gigabytes, the quality on HDTV is clearly superior with Progressive than Interlaced so… To all future owners, I strongly recommend 720 over 1080.

If you want to go really wide, the only choice is the optionnal VCP-L07WEX and that’s quite a shame. I personally don’t get why Sanyo (and others) don’t sell their products with the wide angle because the super-zooms on HD camcorders are almost impossible to use unless you have a tripod…

Same can be said about the AutoFocus, one of the main weaknesses of the HD1000… Oh yeah, in case I didn’t convince you and you still want to use the 1080i function, beware that it requires a special codec which was on previous versions of Quicktime but not in the recent ones! You’ll find yourself jumping from one software to another with various codecs … It really is about time for all to find a main codec to simplify things for everybody on this!

Photo
Big surprise there! The quality is lower than on the HD700. Did I hear you say strange? Indeed… Moreover the HD1000 shoots natively 2288×1712 or 2496×1408 while the HD700 does 3072×2304 (4MPx versus 7.1MPx). No worries though, this is a camera recorder… Althought it’s still a bit disappointing to see that the manufacturers haven’t yet found a way to optimize digicams and camcorders on this particular point. On a side note, the HD1000 lets you take snapshots while recording without interruption!

Pros:
- visual quality
- small and practical
- HD quality at 12 MBPS
- 720p and not only 1080i
- potential (more than just web videos)

Cons:
- Image stabilizer tends to struggle…
- 10x zoom
- AutoFocus
- 1080i codec

Conclusion:
The HD1000 is a real HD camcorder in the palm of your hand. The 720p 12MBps videos offers great quality and doesn’t suffer much from camera jerks. The system is quick and you can start recording in the blink of an eye, a great possibility is the ability to take screenshoots while recording.

Now the downsides… The 1080i codec and image stabilizer need to be worked on, while I would suggest removing the 10x zoom and replacing it with a wide angle.

All in all the Xacti DMC-HD1000 is a nice compact HD camera recorder with its fair share of ups and downs, it proves that Sanyo is heading in the right direction and that there’s still is room for improvements!

Here are a few video tests I did, converted into .wmv so they should run smoothly on most machines:

Download a .zip files with 720p video tests (255Mb)
Download a .zip files with 1080i video tests (220Mb)