The Xacti E1 is the world's first waterproof camcorder, claims Sanyo. The specs concerning immersion meet the JIS IPX8 standards, which simply means that you can stick the camera underwater “to a depth of five feet for up to one hour at a time.” This is probably enough for vacationers looking to film each other or their children while snorkeling or playing water sports. But does $400 price fit a hybrid photo/video camera with average performance and a love for water?



The 1/2.5-inch, 6.37 megapixel CCD sensor is extremely large by SD standards. Its best recording settings are 640x480 at 30fps, compressed to 3Mbps MPEG 4 AVC/H.264 format on SD/SDHC memory cards. This amount of compression degrades images, being over 8 times more compressed than MiniDv. However, with a battery life of around 70 minutes for video recording, you'd need to carry a lot of extra batteries to take advantage of the recording capabilities of 2 hours and 45 minutes on a 4 GB card.



Video performance is good for a consumer hybrid, and similar to every other Sanyo SD camcorder, given that they all have the same sensor and very similar image processing. Colors are accurate and not extremely saturated, but a combination of extreme compression, aggressive noise reduction filters and strong sharpening reduce its image quality to a level significantly below that of the average MiniDV camcorder. Dynamic range and low-light are OK overall, and better than the CG65's. Noise is always present in the video and becomes overpowering once light levels drop.



The 5X optical zoom lens covers a range of 38 - 190mm (35mm equivalent). 38 mm isn't actually wide enough to be considered wide-angle. The 2.5 inch LCD is large enough for an ultra-compact, but has an extremely small resolution of 110,000 pixels. Its maximum aperture is a very slow f3.5, which reduces the CG65's already not-so-brilliant low-light performance.



There are three exposure systems: spot, center and multiple-point. AutoFocus can use five points or a center spot. Manual focus slices an image's depth of field into 16 positions, instead of allowing you to search for an exact focus position. This renders manual focus useless.



Photos are captured at 2,816 x 2,112 6 megapixel resolution. There is an option for interpolating 10 megapixel stills (3670 x 2760) from the maximal 6 mp resolution. Photos can be snapped while recording video. Despite its sensor being equal in size to that of most compact still cameras, photo quality does not reach the same standards.



An internal stereo microphone records two-channel audio, and there is support for an external microphone and headphones.