Sanyo Xacti VPC-E6 review

Sanyo isn't the most prolific camera designer, but it's arguably one of the more adventurous.

The E6's sleek design is surprisingly comfortable to hold, while at the back there's a gigantic 3" screen with a 230,000-pixel resolution and smooth response when composing shots. The touch-sensitive shutter button is unusual too - simply making contact engages the auto-focus, and the gentlest of squeezes captures a picture. This makes taking shots extremely quick (a fast auto-focus and just two seconds between shots help here, too) but we couldn't get used to the touch-sensitive shutter button. Fortunately, there's an option to make it behave more conventionally, with a half-press for auto-focus and a full-press for capture.

Otherwise, the E6 works much like other point-and-shoot digital cameras, with all the essential options and scene presets but no aperture or shutter speed control. The slim design limits the battery size and capacity, so we got only 150 shots from a single charge. Manual focus is available, but with no numerical readout or picture-in-picture to help with focusing, even this screen can't provide enough detail for accurate adjustment.

Image quality ranged from decent to excellent in our tests. Colours were punchy, although skin tones revealed a slight red cast, particularly in artificial lighting. Low light performance was reasonable after we selected ISO 400 to avoid long exposure times, which lead to blur. The macro mode focused down to 1cm for extraordinarily detailed close-ups. Video capture benefited from a smooth automatic exposure and, unusually, the optical zoom is available in video mode, but sound quality was a little light on bass.

This is a competent camera for the style-conscious snapper, but while the superb screen pushes its appeal up a notch, the battery life takes it down.