The Little HD Shoot-out: Canon TX1 and Sanyo VPC-HD2by David KenderPublished on Jun 28, 2007 9:26 AM 
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Picture & Manual Control
Automatic Control
The Canon TX1 (Specs, Recent News, $424.15)’s closet thing to full auto mode is to shift the mode dial to the red camera icon (the one without the letter “M” next to it). In this mode, the function menu is curtailed, and the camera operates auto white balance, exposure, shutter, and ISO. This doesn’t really compare with the one-touch Easy mode buttons you’ll find on Sony camcorders. As mentioned in the Video Performance section earlier, the Canon TX1 had great auto exposure. It tended to exposure slightly lower than the Sanyo, resulted in more detail retention in bright areas. It did a particularly good job with the sky on sunny days, pulling out blue color and small clouds where the Sanyo could only find a washed out white. Exposure shifts were very gradual, as were white balance shifts, which could take as long as 10 seconds. This is good for some users, who want a natural pacing. For those picking up a quick shot here, then a quick shot there, and don’t intend to use the footage in between, the lag time may be frustrating.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $585.36) also lacks a clearly defined “idiot mode,” which is a real detriment in this case. The menu and handling are so poor that novice users should be given every opportunity to avoid contact with it. The automatic adjustments on the VPC-HD2 are stilted. Often, we saw a long, gradual transition, then a quick final jump at the end.
Winner: Canon TX1.
Overall Manual Control
Despite the wide list of features you’re about to read, neither of these cameras are manual control power houses. The problem isn’t so much in the feature set as much as the handling. The Canon TX1 has a lot of decent list of control options: zoom, exposure compensation, manual focus, white balance, My Color presets, and some other tools. The Sanyo VPC-HD2 offers even more focus controls, and throws in ISO control, which functions the same as a gain control would in video mode. The Canon TX1 has ISO control, but only in still mode.
Neither camera is pleasant to operate. We go into this a great deal more later in the Handling section. In short, the grip is terrible, button place is poor, and the joystick needs work, particularly in the case of the Sanyo. Couple this with an abysmal menu design, and you have the worst handling camcorder of the year. In the case of both the Sanyo and the Canon, the ambition of the feature set is at odds with the compact size, and as a result everything is simply too small.
Winner: Sanyo VPC-HD2, for the number of manual controls, and arguably better access.
Zoom
The Canon TX1 offers a 10x optical digital camera zoom. There’s no way around it, Canon. It’s tiny, clunky, sluggish to respond, and it’s also as noisy as a remote controlled car. Don’t be surprised if your recorded audio is tainted with the whirring and buzzing of the raucous zoom motor. The response time will vex you as well, taking seconds to catch on. The worst part is that it just doesn’t feel camcorderesque at all. The TX1 features a digital zoom/tele-converter at standard (40x), 1.5x, or 1.9x focal lengths. These can be activated in the administrative menu. Zooming the TX1 is a bit absurd when attempting to read the information bar—you get a reading for halfway (50cm) and fully closed in (1m). Why Canon chose to label their slider bar metrically and offer so little in the information department is a mystery. Then again, we’re dealing with a digital camera zoom here, but if you’re trying to pitch it as a camcorder too, a little more effort would help.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 utilizes a slider zoom toggle, contrary to a preferable horizontal lever or ring found on larger models. This gums up the works due to the slider’s tendency to catch in its plastic-on-plastic track, causing you to jump from a slow crawl to an extreme MTV close-up. One redeeming quality of the VPC-HD2’s zoom is that it will give you an exact reading to the tenth decimal. For example, if you’re zooming from 9x to 10x, the zoom bar located on the bottom will show the progression of 9.1x, 9.2x, 9.3x, etc. until you reach 10. In this sense, you can truly hone in on a more precise zoom for future reference of the same shot.
Winner: Sanyo VPC-HD2
Zoom Power Ratio
The Canon TX1 offers a 10x optical zoom and a 40x digital zoom, which is quite good for a still camera, but on the low end for a camcorder. Unfortunately, the LCD display does not offer any indication as to where in the zoom range you are – no progress bar and no numerical value. It’s very rare that a camcorder omits both of these kindnesses.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 also offers a 10x optical zoom, with a digital zoom extending up to 100x. Sanyo’s display gives you both the zoom value and a progress bar. Also, when digital zoom is engaged, it tacks on an extension to the progress bar in a different color.
Winner: Tie.
Focus
One of the keys to good HD video is focus. Because you’re shooting in three to four times the definition of standard def, focal errors become that much more pronounced. When auto focus isn’t cutting it, you need a manual focus you can rely on. Better equipped (some might call them “real”) HD camcorders offer powerful focus tools like peaking and one-touch digital zoom close-ups to better define edges. Neither of these hybrid devices offers anything like this.
The Canon TX1 has no manual focus control. Let’s make this very clear, because we had a hard time believing it. Canon released a “high definition camcorder” that offers no way to manually adjust the focus. This is simply unheard of in the camcorder world. The last camcorder we saw lacking this feature was the CVS One Time Use (Specs, ) trinket. We are both shocked and saddened by this omission. The TX1 does offer a handful of auto focus options in still mode, but these don’t seem to be effective in video mode. You’re pretty much stuck with the auto focus.
The Sanyo, by contrast, looks a whole lot better in this category. Simply push down on the joystick to access the focus control. It appears as a scale at the bottom of the screen. An icon moves along the scale to tell you where in the focal range you are, and the camcorder also provides you with an numerical value in metric. The focal range can be tightened or expanded by going to the “MF” options on page 2 of the function menu and selecting a focus mode: Total Range, Standard, or Super Macro.
Winner: The Sanyo VPC-HD2, by a long shot.
Exposure & Aperture
The Canon TX1 offers exposure compensation from -2 to +2 in 1/3 increments. This can be set beforehand or operated while shooting. Like most cameras, there are also several automatic metering modes listed in the function menu. Evaluative metering takes the whole frame into account, center weighted average gives priority to the center of the frame, and spot tells the camera to meter to that precise zone where the spot appears on the LCD. There is no direct aperture control. The controls are easily accessible and smartly placed.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 is the opposite, offering more control and less accessibility. Push the joystick left and you’ll get the exposure compensation tool, which allows for +/-1.8EV in 1/3 increments. From the menu, you can also select full manual mode, which gives you independent aperture and shutter control, or aperture priority, which gives you aperture control and has the camera automatically adjust the shutter. Aperture values are f/3.5, f/4.0, f/4.7, f/5.6, f/6.8, and f/8.0. The joystick is just so bad, though, that getting to what you want is incredibly frustrating.
Winner: The Canon TX1, because ease of use and smart exposure controls are more useful here than features that are a hassle to access.
Shutter Speed
The Canon TX1 does not offer shutter speed control.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 offers the best of both worlds: fully independent shutter and aperture control, and a shutter priority mode, in which you can change the shutter speed and the aperture adjusts automatically for best exposure. The VPC-HD2 offers shutter speeds from 1/30th to 1/10,000th. Yet again, though, there is a problem with the implementation. Because there is no differentiation between still mode and video mode, the shutter control allows you to select speeds as low as 1/15th, 1/8th, even 2 full seconds. It’s not until you hit record that you would see the bottom floor is 1/30th. Poor design like this could so easily have been avoided.
Winner: Sanyo, for the option, not the execution.
White Balance
The white balance controls on the Canon TX1 are located in the function menu. Options include Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, and Custom (Manual). We had a hard time setting the manual white balance, mostly due to our slavish need for convention. You see, on most camcorders, when you scroll over to the manual setting, you simply push in on the joystick. Here, you are presented with a message reading “Menu Evaluate White Bal.” It was at least a day before we realized this was an instruction to hit the “Menu” button to actually set the white balance. This is far from intuitive, but once the secret is cracked, the control works fine. We found the white balance adjust to the quite accurate. The extensive list of presets is also handy, in case auto white balance is not cutting it and there’s nothing around to use as a white or grey reference for manual adjustments.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 also places the white balance controls in their function menu, with options for Auto, Sun, Overcast, Fluorescent, Incandescent, and Manual. . In manual mode, one center press of the joystick is all you need—the camera hastily hones in on its color and you’re ready to roll.
Winner: Canon TX1
Gain
Neither the Canon TX1 nor the Sanyo VPC-HD2 has a gain control, in the traditional camcorder sense. Both, however, offer control of the ISO, which is a sensitivity measure similar to gain, more closely associated with still cameras. The Canon TX1’s ISO controls are accessed by pushing up on the joystick. They include Auto, High Auto, 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600. If set to Auto or High Auto, press the shutter button halfway down to see what the camera is going to set the ISO to.
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 includes ISO settings of Auto, 50, 100, 200, 400, and 800. There is also a High Sensitivity button located in the LCD cavity that bumps the ISO up considerably. In our shooting experience, it was better to leave the camera in auto mode, except in extremely low light conditions.
Winner: The Canon TX1 has more options and makes them more accessible.
Other Manual Controls
The Sanyo VPC-HD2 offers a much shorter list of one-touch color settings: Soft, Vivid, and Soft Vivid. Also included is a Neutral Density filter, which drops the exposure evenly with a touch, allowing for more controlled focus in bright light. Finally, the Sanyo offers a Flicker Reduction setting, which fixes the shutter speed at 1/50th to reduce fluorescent light flickering.
Winner: The Canon TX1 has more one-touch color correction tools, but we can achieve the same effects in even the most basic editing program these days. The Sanyo's neutral density filter is a lot more useful for an HD camcorder.