Sanyo Xacti CA6 Digital Camcorder Negative Review

Sanyo VPC-CA6 Hyprid Camcorder/Camera



Summary: Don't buy this gadget, very poor design compared to the previous Sanyo Xacti model I used.

My first Sanyo Xacti camcorder was the C40 which I had for about one year, and proved to be a very reliable, versatile and useful little digital camcorder with the added advantage of it taking very good quality photographs. Having used the Sanyo Xacti C40 digital camcorder for over a year filming various movies including my african bicycle adventure, my driving school video podcasts and my hang glider blog photographs, I was very upset when the little silver Sanyo Xacti C40 digital camcorder disappeared into thin air. I don't know if it was stolen, or I just lost it.

A few months latter, and I really needed another small digital camcorder to replace the Sanyo C40, as my Sony Digital 8 TRV camcorder was too big to carry around with me all the time.

I wanted to buy another Sanyo Xacti C40, but it was no longer available to buy, so the next model that came up was the Sanyo Xacti CA6 digital camcorder. I needed a replacement really fast, and having been totally satisfied with my first purchase from the Sanyo stable of Camcorders, I didn't think twice about buying the Sanyo CA6. What a big mistake.

When the Sanyo package arrived, I eagerly opened the box, and as I took the digital camcorder out of the wrapping, the first thing I noticed was the plastic casing of the Sanyo CA6 digital camcorder as opposed to the metallic silver casing of the Xacti C40, that was not the only disappointment.

I opened up the camera lcd view finder to find out that the camcorder viewfinder does not swivel around and therefore I can't record video blogs with it! The other problem is you can't charge the battery while it is in the camera, which rules it out it being used as a webcam. Finally the VPC-CA6 does not have a tripod mounting hole as did the Sanyo Xacti C40, so I can't take professionally stable shots!

On the whole a big disappointment when compared to the excellent Sanyo Xacti C40.

I would have returned the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA6 back to the place I bought it from, but I was just too lazy packing it up and then arranging a courier to take it back, especially when I would have to pay for delivery charges.

So my advice to you is don't buy the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA6 Digital Camcorder!

Hitachi HD Digital Video Camera

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Blogger.com Custom domains not for business blog

Don't use blogger.com and the custom domains feature for a business blog, even if you have a totally customised blogger template. Today 2nd June 2008 blogger.com suffered an outage, which meant I could not post on my blog, neither could anyone access any blogs hosted by blogger.com. This included blogs on blogspot.com and all blogs using custom domains.

Even though using a custom domain means you can use any of your registered domains as the address for your blog, because the blog is still hosted on blogger.com, any outage on blogger.com will also affect your blog!

Non of my custom domains hosted on blogger.com where business critical, but it just occured to me, that some small businesses or people running business from home, might be using the custom domain feature for their make money online blogs.

It is a shame that blogger layouts are not supported on ftp hosted blogger blogs, as I wouldn't have thought twice about moving my blogs to that option.

I'm hoping that today's blogger.com outage will be the last for a long time

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