In summary
[ia] Available in orange, black or silver, Sanyo’s VPC-J4 has a dual Basic/Expert shooting menu system and talking navigation guide that announces the selected mode when the camera is switched on. A vertical slider selects between stills, video and playback. The flash button doubles as an erase button in playback mode. The arrow pad adjusts exposure and focus modes. . . [more]
Full review
Available in orange, black or silver, Sanyo’s VPC-J4 has a dual Basic/Expert shooting menu system and talking navigation guide that announces the selected mode when the camera is switched on. A vertical slider selects between stills, video and playback. The flash button doubles as an erase button in playback mode. The arrow pad adjusts exposure and focus modes. Everything else is accessed via the menu button. The J4 has two interpolated high-resolution settings (8M and 6M) but SuperFine compression is not available for these modes. Test images were contrasty but colours were accurate. Low light shots were visibly noise affected at ISO 400. Close-up performance was good. The white balance control delivered good colour accuracy with the custom setting.
The VPC-J4 powered-up and shut down almost instantaneously. We measured an average capture lag of 0.4 seconds, regardless of whether focusing was required. The burst mode captured up to four shots at 0.7 second intervals. Video clips can be recorded at VGA, QVGA or QQVGA resolution with frame rates of 15 or 30 frames per second. Picture quality was good but you can only store nine seconds of VGA at 30fps on the supplied 16MB memory card.
Strengths
- Basic/Expert shooting menu system
- Above average video quality
- Quick to power-up and shut down
Weaknesses
- Weak flash
- Poor auto white balance in incandescent light [BG05]
Specifications
Image sensor: 5.27 x 3.95mm interlace scan CCD with 4,230,000 photosites (4.0 megapixels effective)
Lens: 5.7-16.0mm f2.8-3.9 zoom (equivalent to 37-104mm in 35mm format)
Zoom ratio: 2.8x optical, up to 4x digital
Dimensions (wxhxd): 101 x 46 x 26mm
Weight: 128g (without battery and card)
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