Photos: Hands-on with Sanyo Xacti CA65, HD700 and HD1000

We're suckers for waterproof stuff here at Crave. If we're not tracking the Titanic, we're prowling the casinos of Las Vegas looking for fountains to drop our Olympus 790s in. We didn't think we'd get wet in the halls of CES 2008, but this is Vegas and it seems a pool is never far away. Good on Sanyo, then, for diving in the deep end with the Xacti CA65, a waterproof camcorder. We also got our damp hands on the new Xacti HD700 and HD1000, two teeny-tiny hi-def shooters.

The pool-friendly CA65 shoots MPEG-4 video in the AVC/H.264 codec. Sanyo claims an 8GB SDHC memory card will handle 10 hours of 640x480-pixel video at 30 frames per second.

The CA65 is submersible to nearly 2m for up to an hour, so it's fine for the local swimming pool, although we wouldn't recommmend it. Snorkelling, snowboarding and the beach are probably more appropriate for the 5x zoom, and if you spot a particularly interesting bit of coral there's a super-macro function able to zoom in as close as 1cm. You can then preview your coral on a 64mm (2.5-inch) 16:9 LCD screen.

The CA65 is known as the E1 to the Yanks, and is available now for just under £200 in yellow, white or a sort of turquoise. Click through the links to towel off with this submariner's hi-def brothers. -Rich Trenholm

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