2 new Panasonic cams with 3x CMOS
 

Have a look here

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=869998

Even though its 3 chip CMOS its 1/6-inch! Isn't too petite? VS the HV30/20

Press release:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=869998

Watch.Impress article.
Original Japanese:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/do...80618/pana.htm
English Translated:
http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/trans...618%2Fpana.htm

Its about time Panasonic decided to release small HD camcorders that aren’t gimped.
Now how about a replacement to the HSC-1U?

I was about to moan about the 1/6 chips too, but come on, these things cost a grand.

Seems to me that these little cameras are being announced or released every other month by someone. Isn't that segment of the market getting a little crowded and confusing to navigate?

Hmmm, those look promising, VF, manual control, a real ring... will be interesting to see if they deliver. Lots of good sounding specs and supposed improvements, will be worht watching!

All the new releases are trying to find where the market for HD camcorders is... SD is probably dead in the consumer space, but I'd suspect they still don't know what will sell, so they throw stuff out and see if it sticks, if it doesn't, Panasonic in particular kills the product almost before it hits the shelves...

When the market figures out what it wants in an HD camcorder, maybe some of the competition will shake out.

Yay! A mic input!

Recent Panasonic HD cams left off this feature, making the cameras impractical for low-budget lo-pro-sumer work. With audio in, the multi-ring, zebras and histogram, these could be viable for many DVI-ers.

One subtle thing I'll be curious to know: how many facets are in the iris? We own a GS500, and it has four. That makes lens flare effects square, which is far from artistic! It's not a litmus-test feature (we only clued in recently), but five or more facets would be nice.

If the image is on par with the HV20/30, these cams will be the new consumer champs, simply because of the ring and likely better usability, compared to the HV20/30 menus and focus roller.

Here you’ll find several pages worth of information about these 2 camcorders. Just keep hitting NEXT at the bottom of each page.

Original Japanese
http://panasonic.jp/dvc/sd100/index.html

English Translated
http://translate.google.com/translat...F8&sl=ja&tl=en

Please post if you find an English version.

Thank you Paul.

The marketing looks as good as what JVC did for their HD7. :)

Granted the CMOS chips only have 500K photosites -- it's still hard to believe it can meet Japanese LUX specs at 1/60th of 4 lux, without: Either lots of noise or lots of DSP to remove noise yielding chroma reduction and/or resolution loss. This is a particular worry up against EXMOR.

With Bayer pattern offering about 1MP per color vs 1/2MP -- the rez. ain't gonna match Sony or Canon.

Less rez. and more noise -- but "pro" like features. Who is this market too?

i wish they made a solid state HDV cam one day!

Technically, that wouldn't be possible, because by definition, HDV is tape based.

The Sony Z7U is HDV and it has the option to record to compact flash cards.

The EX1 can essentially record HDV on SxS cards.

Key word being 'option'. Any camera carrying the official HDV logo must have either a mini-dv or full sized dv tape cassette transport.

-gb-

It may be the same image size and bit rate, but it ain't HDV.

Anyone have a list of supported frame rates(p or i)? From the links all I could find was shoots at 24fps, or a 3 sec 72 frame burst (still 24fps).