Sanyo has released a camera here in Japan that’s kind of a cross between a video camera and a still digital camera. It’s being demoed at this week’s Macworld Tokyo.
The iDshot can record still images up to 1360 x 1024 and it can record digital video at 30 fps at up to 640 x 480. The camera uses Sanyo’s Hyper RISC Graphic Processor (HRGP), described as “a super high-speed processing technology,” to achieve the frame rate used on NTSC broadcast television. HRGP also enables high-speed consecutive still shots, according to Sanyo. In addition, for those users requiring long playback time, the iD PHOTO disk can hold 120 minutes of 160 x 120 resolution video images at 15 frames per second.
And guess what format the video is recorded in? QuickTime.
The iDshot utilizes Sanyo’s half-inch 1.5 million pixel Vertical Pixel Mixture CCD (VPmixCCD) as the eye of the camera. The VPmixCCD is especially effective in realizing high picture quality and high sensitivity for moving images, the company claims.
The camera’s folder function lets users store and retrieve still, sequential images as well as audio and video in each folder. All the data is stored on a small optical disk holding up to 730MB called iD Photo, which is a new format. Utilizing the removable iD PHOTO magneto-optical disk, which measures 50mm in diameter, the camera can capture 120 minutes of movies or about 11,000 still images, according to Sanyo.
iD Photo is a joint venture with Sanyo, Olympus, and Hitachi Maxell. The companies say that disks offer “high-speed writing” at 20Mbps. The price of the magneto-optical disks start at US$35.
Also, this camera uses FireWire for connecting to a computer. Though Sanyo doesn’t use the name Firewire, the iDshot brochure shows how the camera’s software looks mounted on a Mac desktop via FireWire.