Sanyo: New digicam coming soon By
Mike Tomkins
(Monday, February 10, 2003 - 14:52 EST)
Yet another company is apparently preparing to launch a digital camera in the weeks running up to the Photo Marketing Association show - this time Japanese consumer electronics giant Sanyo.
The company is running a teaser for a new digital camera which apparently will be launched on Wednesday. The name has yet to be revealed, but a number of other flash files are visible on the company's website and between them all, you can get some idea of what's coming.
The camera will presumably be following in the footsteps of Sanyo's existing DSC-MZ1, DSC-MZ2 and DSC-MZ3 models. It would seem logical that it would be called the DSC-MZ4, but the teasers repeatedly show a stylised 'X' symbol - perhaps indicating that the name will be changed (DSC-MZX?).
Nothing of the camera's actual specifications has been revealed as yet, but the camera is described as an "animation digital camera", and will provide high-quality movie functionality, something its predecessors also excelled at. Similarly, it is also apparently targetting shot-to-shot speed, which the previous DSC-MZ cameras were notable for. Sanyo are playing up the styling of the camera, which they say will be more stylish and with an emphasis on design.
The flash files themselves do contain small crops of an image we presume is the new camera; not much is shown through the overlays, but looking at images extracted from the flash file you can see the camera has a mode dial located almost at the very right-hand corner and a loop for a hand or neck strap on the right-hand side. There's a small ridge with silver detailing on the front of the camera down the right side to help provide grip and a built-in flash unit at the top left corner of the camera. The very edge of the lens appears in one picture, suggesting it has been moved from the left-hand edge as on previous cameras, to the center of the camera, and what appears to be a colored light or piece of trim above the lens (the color can be seen to change in the fourth and final flash teaser).
The teasers themselves are located on Sanyo's server, but don't have any HTML pages to wrap them, so they appear full-screen rather than at their intended size. Hence, we've assembled a number of holder pages to display the teasers below (along with a banner that is shown inline on Sanyo's main page): Watch this space for more on this announcement, which apparently will happen soon!
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