thanx Allen, i hope they make a sexy black on in the PAL oooer baby!!! hehehe

i will be buying many of the accessories, my friend that's over there at the moment said tokyo was more expensive than anywhere else in Japan, and he said he'd check out bigcamera for me, but he's kinda absent minded and not overly technically minded, i don't think he is anyway.

anyone know if the wide angle lens does a similar thing to an Anamorphic lens??

gS400

will not do "high definition" as we understand it in the US.

Not for 1200 bucks, lads. This is going to be a SD cam. The HD is panny's crystal engine reference.

This cam will be the same as the gs100, but bigger ccd's. I'm hoping for a true 16x9, because if it ain't got that it ain't got much.

That 1.04 compensation algorithym the old gs100 used isn't good enough anymore for 16x9 video.

You're not happy with your GS100 widescreen mode? What type of display device are you using?

BTW Michael, George knows the GS400 will be a native SD cam but he's hoping for an undocumented (and highly unlikely) 720p mode output firewire or written to SD card. It would be nice but most of us know how cam manufacturers rarely have the consumers best interests in mind when designing a cam.

The GS100 has a 1.04x vertical zoom to achieve its anamorphically squeezed size of 720x480.

http://panasonic.jp/dvc/gs100k/ki_wide.html

thanx, Tommy.