Review: Sanyo Xacti DMX-CA8 digital camera

Taking photos underwater or on the ski slopes often requires a separate water-tight housing for your digital camera.

Sanyo’s Xacti DMX-CA8 is, however, built from the ground up to be waterproof to a depth of 1.5m for 60 minutes.

The DMX-CA8 hides its waterproofing features well, with rubber padding sealing the battery, USB and SD compartment. It withstood our informal testing comfortably.

Its pistol-grip design presents an array of easy-to-use buttons and the menu system is intuitive, presenting many interesting options including 10-shot burst and webcam modes.

At its core, the DMX-CA8 uses an eight-megapixel Cmos sensor for photos and a high bitrate (6Mbits/sec) 60fps (frames per second) VGA video mode.

The lens is 38mm equivalent, which is very narrow, leaving photos looking noticeably more restrictive than most cameras with a 35mm lens. However, if you’re interested in zooming in on objects in the distance the Xacti’s narrow angle lens and 5x optical zoom is fine.

For picture quality, we tested the Sanyo Xacti against a two-year-old Canon Ixus 60 compact digital camera, which produces reasonable picture quality and can still be bought for £100.

When focusing on objects less than 1m away, there was also considerable convex lens distortion and the Xacti looked blurry, darker and even blocky in places compared with the old Canon ­ in fact the Xacti produces some of the worst photos we’ve seen from an eight-megapixel camera.

Worse still, video quality on the highest setting was noisy and compression artefacts visible. We blame Sanyo’s choice of Cmos sensor and lens, which leaves you paying a rather a lot for the Xacti’s compact and waterproof chassis. Ultimately it’s an impressive design that’s let down by poor performance.