A few days ago, Akihabara News wrote a review of the new Sanyo Xacti HD1 (sample vids available), the new HD digital camcorder that records straight to SD. They found that in most respects the camcorder was a big improvement over its predecessors. Handling, design, and functionality were greatly improved. A good review, except for one major area: the video. Apparently the video is just horrible, or “disastrous” as they put it. Also, the image stabilizer isn’t worth jack. This camcorder has been so hyped up that I was suprised to see such a horrible review.

Well, apparently, the Xacti HD1’s horrible video quality may be due to a significant bug in the way the camcorder is encoding the video. Basically it looks like any borders (e.g. of a roof, a stairwell, etc) that are oriented like a backslash (”\”) are being encoded oriented like a forward slash (”/”). Vice versa the Xacti HD1 encodes correctly. Here is what they mean:

The subject:

\
_\
__\
___\
___/
__/
_/
/

Filmed with the HD1 in 720p, it is systematically displayed like this:

/
_/
__/
___/
___/
__/
_/
/

The sample video Akihabara has posted really does look quite bad. This is an interesting phenomenon, and one that will hopefully be remedied before the Xacti HD1 is fully shipped. Here’s hoping…

[ via Akihabara ]