Still and Motion Pictures in One Digital Camera

Cameron Crouch

Tired of lugging both a digital camera and a camcorder when you want to take stills and videos of vacations or a kid's soccer games? The IDC-1000z IDshot from Sanyo Fisher gives you full image and video capture in one device--convenient, but not a perfect solution.

While impressive for a camcorder, the $1499 IDshot's 1.5 megapixels are meager for a still camera. The camera does capture VGA resolution (640 by 480) video at 30 frames per second--better than broadcast quality. And its price is steep for less-than-top-quality still images. For the same money, you could buy a 2-megapixel digital camera and a digital camcorder separately.

The Sanyo ID Photo digital disk in my shipping camera provided impressively high-capacity storage--730MB--for only $35; flash memory used in other cameras costs around $360 for 256MB. But the storage news isn't all good: This disk is bulky and incompatible with other devices.

Using the IDshot was fairly easy. The camera provides the usual LCD menu navigation for setting resolution, focus, and exposure. A handy knob surrounding the power button let me smoothly switch from video to image to the "camera-PC" mode the unit uses to communicate with a PC. I shot roughly equal amounts of photos (in middle to high resolution) and video (at one-quarter VGA), and found the rechargeable battery's life poor; it lasted only about 1 hour. The disk stores only about 8 minutes of video shot in VGA resolution.

The camera captures JPEG images and video in QuickTime--a compressed video format that keeps file size manageable--and supports USB and IEEE 1394 hookups.

When you connect via IEEE 1394, you can view and edit images and QuickTime videos stored on the ID Photo disk without transferring them to your desktop. The software bundle includes capture software, MGI PhotoSuite, QuickTime, a Sanyo panorama program, and Adobe Premiere LE.

This camera offers good video and average-quality still pictures--a combination that's well suited for Web multimedia and image sharing. But at $1499, the IDC-1000z places a high price on convenience.

Buying Information

IDC-1000z IDshot Good video camera; high-capacity, inexpensive storage; direct video transfer to the Web. Pricey overall, too ambitious. May be better to stick with still and video cameras instead. List price: $1499 Sanyo Fisher 818/998-7322 http://www.sanyousa.com