Evaluation:  
Conclusion: Needed repair; bad experience
Review: After 9 months, the buttons on the camera stopped functioning. Contacted Sanyo and was referred to their Service Provider, Skokie TV.
Contacted Skokie and shipped my camera to them in early September. Hearing nothing after 2 weeks, I contacted Skokie and learned that diagnostics had found a faulty "control unit", which needed to be ordered from Sanyo.
After 2 more weeks and no news, I contacted Skokie again and was informed that the replacement unit arrived defective and was reordered from Sanyo.
After 2 more weeks, I contacted Skokie again and was advised that they were awaiting the replacement part.
Service and communication from Skokie are unacceptable. I have now waited 6 weeks and still do not know when I will get my camera back. My 16 months old baby is walking, talking, learning... and we are missing the capture moments for which our Sanyo was intended.
Although we love the camera, would caution buyers as to the defective control unit and after-market experience with Skokie.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Sold It
Review: After owning the HD2 for 6 months I sold it on eBay.
This is a tweener device - trying to be both a video camera and a digital still camera. I thought I was getting the best of both, but really the HD2 isn't great at either. Video and photo quality was fair - despite the 7.1 MP resolution, the picture quality wasn't as good as I had been getting from the 2MP Canon SD200 that it replaced. Sure I had more pixels, but subjectively (mostly - "these don't look as good as your old camera..." from the family) the colors didn't look as good and there was reasonably high noise. Also the "image stabilizer" used cropping so you lose field of view on the wide end (making the 39mm equiv. more like a 50mm), making this hard to use indoors.
But what ultimately got me to put it up for sale was the drop in the number of pictures I was taking. I just didn't like using it as much so I didn't carry it as often and when I did didn't take as many pictures. Part of that was the quality, but more the pistol grip style camera just didn't work for me - I much prefer the standard box shape.
It wasn't all bad, it has a long 10x optical zoom in a small body and pretty high compression (with good quality) on the videos.
After selling it I went back to a standard digital camera, I bought a Canon PowerShot SD870IS 8MP Digital Camera. I'm much happier with this, it is a great digital camera that happens to take good SD videos, my picture (and video) count has gone back up.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Low Battery Time
Review: A good camcorder for outdoor use.
However, a full charged battery lasts only about 22 minutes for a continuous recording. You'd better get at least two backup batteries.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Bad compromise
Review: I expected the video to be so-so and the pictures to be excellent. Both were miserable.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Horrid! Don't waste your money, just get an HD1000!
Review: To preface this lambasting, in all fairness, this camera -IS- quite adept at SD (Standard Definition). But the HD settings look like SD resized to 1440 pixels across. That's not HD in MY book, nor should it be advertised as such.
And it's for that reason that this camera has to rank as one of the worst electronics purchases I've ever made. The HD image quality is atrociously bad: anything in slight shadow or darker becomes deep DEEP black, highlights or anything close to a highlight becomes pure white, not to mention the super-pixelating compression. Completely worthless indoors, at night, or in anything approaching a low light situation. In bright daylight, I was able to manage a super-compressed blobish complexion on my subjects, with a framerate resembling about 15fps. A $600 FisherPrice camera. I was angry to say the least.
Frankly, I am a little surprised that this camera has received the glowing reviews it has on Amazon. It is for this reason that I kept the camera a little longer, fiddling with the settings, reading the manual all the way through, seeing if there was anything I was missing to boost the quality. In the end, it was all for naught. Perhaps I took receipt of a defective model, but all I know is that I returned the HD2, and I am now more than pleased with my HD1000. It's WELL worth the extra $40 if you want solid 720p image quality.
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