Toshiba Camileo P30 – Making Video Recording Easy

Toshiba has been the quintessential Japanese electronics maker and it has products competing with rivals in each market. Another product from the company is Camileo P30 which claims to bring video recording to the masses. And did you notice that this product does 1080p recording. Yup, that is HD video recording in a camcorder that is not large that your palm.

At its longest point, the device measures just 104 mm, and at 160 gms, the camera is almost as light as you can expect it to be. The weight includes the battery and memory card by the way. True it is not as small as Creative Vado HD, it is still small enough to go in the jacket. On the negative side, the camera has no lens cap, Toshiba does include a pouch for carrying the camera.

Confusingly, the company has not been pretty forthcoming about the actual innards of the device, The camera has a 5MP CMOS sensor, but this is all that we know about it. It is this high capacity lens which enables the 1080p recording at an effective 30 fps (29.97 progressive). The camera features a native resolution of 1440 X 1080 as expected. It is anamorphic resolution.  The meaning here is that this is not true 1920 X 1080 Full HD but hey what more can you ask for at such a price! Other recording options include WVGA, VGA, QVGA and 720p.

If you are ready to put up with interpolation, you get still images of up to 8 MP. Now the resolution here is 3200 X 2400 which is not exactly 8 MP but with interpolation, even this much is not worth it. You are advised to stay in the native resolution of 2592 X 1944. There is a paltry 96 MB of onboard memory and you can put in SD HC cards for more storage. It is advised to choose 8GB SDHC cards as they are great value for money.

The camera stores video in Quicktime MOV format with H.264 compression. In order to keep things simple, Toshiba has all but wiped the manual controls. There is a small LED bulb which can act as flash light in low light conditions but you should not bank on it. To put it in a nut shell, Toshiba Camileo P30 is a product you can consider if you love home videos.