Also interesting is that allegedly Panasonic purchased Sanyo and put out the TM700K with the specs of the HD2000 / VPC-FH1 minus the 1280x720p at 30fps.

Well, Panasonic did purchase a controlling interest in Sanyo: http://www.thestreet.com/story/10643139/panasonic-buys-sanyo-for-46-billion.html. Apparently, this took about a year to complete, it was only finalized last December. This makes Panasonic the largest CE company in Japan, and also a major powerhouse in batteries.

But the TM700 has absolutely nothing to do with the VPC-FH1/HD2000. They're totally different designs, different sensors, etc. And of course, there was no time for technology sharing anyway, though perhaps that's on the way in the future... you would expect some consolidation. Simply put, much like last year's TM300, the TM700 is a 3-chip camera using 3 Mpixel, 1/4" CMOS sensors, as opposed to Sanyo's single 8Mpixel, 1/2.5" CMOS sensor. It adds SDXC support on top of SDHC, offers excellent optical image stabilization, and does AVCHD.

And yeah, as well, a 28Mb/s 1080/60p mode using an MP4 stream... since AVCHD doesn't support 1080/60p. But it's unrelated to Sanyo, and certainly not the last camera that's going to add 1080/60p. It also doesn't have the MP4 file format bugs (negative timecodes) that cause Vegas to crash. The TM700 also supports 24p in addition to 60i and 60p, but yeah, it's always doing 1920x1080. The 1080/60p is only at 28Mb/s, while 1080/60i can run at 17Mb/s, 13Mb/s, 9Mb/s, or 5Mb/s, and 1080/24p can run at 17Mb/s or 13Mb/s. All bitrates are VBR, not fixed. If I ever had need for 5Mb/s video, I'd definitely prefer 720/30p to 1080/60i... but I'm unlikely to use any lower bitrate, anyway. Like Sanyo (and unlike everyone else), Panasonic has also supported manual settings on consumer video cameras for a long while.

Curiously, I own both TM700 and FH1... the FH1 is what finally convinced me that tapeless and AVC were mature enough to replace tape. At $400, it was a pretty low risk, and it's replaced my ailing Canon HV10 as my backpacking camera. Hopefully, Sanyo maintains this line, Panasonic maintains theirs, but they share technology enough to improve both lines. Sanyo could sure use Panasonic's OIS tech. And I think Sanyo's approach (also used by Sony, Canon, and JVC) may be better if you're really trying to build a camera equally suitable for video and stills... 3-chip is strongly weighted toward video quality (I did a still photo comparison, which is here: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/ptest). However, the only time I care about this is when I can only take one camera.

I, too, own both the FH1, HD2000, and TM700 (along with a Sony), and the TM700 is miles ahead of the FH1 for most needs: Almost as small as the FH1, but with immensely better image quality in normal light - 1000 lines, vs. 650 lines resolution, better color, immensely better stabilization, mic & headphone jacks, zebra stripes, blue outlines when in focus and using manual focus ring, etc.. It is more expensive, but I got mine for only $750 by signing up for corporateperks.com. I think I'm going to put my HC1 and HD2000 on ebay.

Camcorderinfo had a glowing review of the TM700:

". . . the HDC-TM700 has blown everything else out of the water in terms of video performance," Another review even rated it better than the new Sony CX550

For video, the Panasonic makes perfect sense. 3-chip cameras have always dominated the pro market (they were pretty much the only option, until very large CMOS chips in 4K cinema cameras and DSLRs came along)... better color and sensitivity, all things being equal.

Sanyo's taking the modern single-chip approach. A single-chip sensor is not inherently evil, but using normal Bayer interpolation, you get color distortions along any high contrast boundary, as the interpolation algorithms "guess wrong". They can fix this by going to much higher resolution sensors... make an 8Mpixel image, and you can have independent R, G, and B sensors per pixel. But it makes the pixels so much smaller.. thus Sanyo's 1/2.5" sensor.

Sony's trying out a compromise, which is curious at least. They take a normal sensor array and tilt it 45 degrees. This results in a diamond-patten sensor array, basically the sensors in one row are interstitial relative to the next row. Then they create a interpolated pixel for each real pixel and for each intersection between pixels... so now you have twice as many. But given the interstices, the interpolations are closer together and they zig-zag, so the color distortion is less, but you didn't need as many sensors, so the senors can be larger. Anyway, the interpolated 8Mpixel array is then, of course, downscaled to 2Mpixel for the image. This shouldn't be quite as sharp as Panasonic's 3-chippers or the 8Mpixel+ single chippers, but for the same sensor size, they're probably more light sensitive (eg, larger photodiode sites).

They also have the photodiodes on one side of their chip, the wiring on the other... like an Octopus eye, not a human eye (the former being a better design, eye-wise). Some sensors run the light past the metal layer, potentially dropping some light along the way... or not. That depends on how well the microlenses target the actual photodiodes in any given sensor chip.

They call this ClearVid... Fujifilm called it "SuperCCD" when they used the same technique in digital still cameras... you can find out more searching on those terms.

Like any single sensor design, they're making a trade-off between light gathering and color accuracy. This is why Sony's using 6Mpixel sensors, while Sanyo and Canon use 8Mpixel, and at least one JVC uses a 10Mpixel sensor.

I would not hesitate to purchase the TM700 for it's overall qualities. But for fast moving sports - the Sanyo VPC-FH1 with it's 720p @ 30fps is worth it's weight in gold!

Jay Mitchell

For slow motion, FH1A's 1080p @ 60fps is pretty nice too! (;

Am I missing something? Why is 30fps for fast-moving sports better than the 60fps available on both the FH1 & TM700?

I suppose that answer has to do with the intended end use of the footage. ESPN with a billion dollar budget tested both 60p and 30p cameras and decided that 30p was best for their current broadcast television needs. I tested both 1920x1080p vs 1280x720p for my sports projects and found that 720p gave me a much smaller file size, encodes great in mp4/AVC, looks great on both sd and hd televisions, 720p on youtube is steller, my clients are all happy campers. I would not rule out shooting 1080p. Last summer I shot California Condors flying at 1080p and the footage is very nice.

Jay Mitchell