Panasonic Joins the Hybrid Camcorder Trend with SDR-H200 and SDR-H20by David KenderPublished on Jan 7, 2007 3:00 PM 
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January 7, 2007 - Today at CES, Panasonic announced that they will also offer two hybrid camcorders. The SDR-H200 ($799 MSRP) will feature a 30GB hard disk drive (HDD) and the ability to record video to SD and SDHC cards. The SDR-H20 ($599 MSRP) will also include a 30GB HDD and a 512MB SD card. Both will offer optical image stabilization and a 32x optical zoom.
The hybrid camcorders, Rudi Vitti stated in the press release, "are ideal for travel and event shooting.... They can hold 21times more data than an 8cm DVD, and if users do need to keep shooting before downloading a full drive, they can swtich to the SD card and continue recording without interruption."
The SDR-H200 comes equipped with the CCDs, a 10x optical zoom, and 3.1MP still recording. Reading between the lines of the press release, the model-down, the SDR-H200 has a single, smaller CCD, most likely 1/6" due to the 32x optical zoom. Both camcorders include a USB and a one-touch "DVD Copy" button, which in conjunction with the bundled software and a DVD burner allows for instant archiving.
This is a standard definition camcorder and like the SDR-S150 (Review, Specs, $699.95) SD-card camcorder video is encoded in MPEG-2. There are three quality settings which correspond to the bit rate. XP quality records at approximately 9Mbps, SP at 5Mbps, and LP at 2.5 Mbps.
Both models are scheduled for an April 2007 release.