Sanyo on Wednesda unveiled the Xacti HD700, a new pocket-sized digital camcorder that records 720p HD video and 7.1-megapixel digital photos to SD or SDHC flash media cards. It will be available at the end of October for $599.99.
The HD700 comes in red, silver and brown finishes, and uses the same optical processing engine found in Sanyo’s VPC-HD1000 camcorder. It encodes video in H.264, and can fit 2 hours and 46 minutes of 720p-quality video onto an 8GB memory card.
The HD700 features a “face chaser” function that detects and isolates faces to assist with exposure and auto-focus of still images, and it includes a 5x all-glass optical zoom lens and 2.7-inch widescreen LCD display that flips out and rotates up to 285 degrees on an axis.
The camcorder is Mac compatible and works with iMovie 08, according to Sanyo, which also includes Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 for Windows users.