Sanyo Electric introduced a new concept camera called Xacti DMX C-1, combining digital movie and digital camera capabilities in one device. Sanyo claims that this is the world's first MPEG-4 format video camcorder of VGA images with 30fps recorded on an SD memory card.

A current product of Sanyo uses Motion JPEG format and requires a 12Mbps coding rate. The coding rate of 2-3Mbps will be enough for high-quality images, according to a Sanyo official.

"We expect a 1GB SD memory card will be on the market this fall, which enables recording of one-hour movies using the TV-HQ (2Mbps) mode," said Akio Kobayashi, manager, digital imaging group, multimedia technology dept, R&D business unit, consumer group of Sanyo.

The digital still camera part can take 3.2 mega-pixel images. The feature is that while shooting video, users also can capture still image with a simple shutter press.

DMX C-1 employs a 5.8x optical zoom lens with an F3.5 aperture.

The main unit weighs approximately 155g, and the dimensions are 69mm (W) x 34mm (D) x 108mm (H) (149cc).