Sanyo launches Xacti CA8 underwater camera

Sanyo on Friday unveiled the newest addition to its Xacti underwater digital camera line with the CA8. The camera is rated for underwater use at a maximum depth of nearly five feet and one hour safely and will shoot 60fps MPEG-4 video at 640x480-pixel resolution or 3264x2448-pixel photos via its 8-megapixel CMOS sensor. Sanyo's pixel-interpolation technology allows bumping up the photos to an equivalent 12 megapixels. Two dedicated buttons -- one for video record, the other for still image capture -- make it easier for the CA8 to capture images, although at a reduced 2MP size, while filming.

The camera's paltry 44MB of internal memory is bolstered by an SD memory card slot, which means memory is expandable to 32GB when such cards become available. The battery is rated to supply 75 minutes of continuous video recording or 170 minutes of video playback via the 2.5-inch foldout LCD screen.

The 5x optical zoom lens also features a digital image stabilizer, and movies can be filmed in 320x240 resolution meant for direct uploads to the Internet. For editing, the CA8 includes Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 software.

An underwater shooting mode sharpens up the colors to make objects look more vivid and counteract the muddying effect. Sanyo's Face Chaser feature can identify up to six faces in movies and 12 in still images and enhance them with automatic exposure and focus adjustments. Meantime, a sequential photo mode is capable of taking up to 10 photos at 5 frames per second.

Sanyo will offer the CA8 in black/orange, blue and white color schemes. Sanyo will ship 30,000 CA8s in Japan in mid-May with an estimated price of an equivalent of $490. No US dates or prices have yet been released, though an official announcement is expected soon. [via Impress]