Panasonic Poised to Bring AVCHD Camcorder to Market by John Neely Published on Sep 26, 2006 1:00 PM

In Tokyo this morning, Panasonic announced that it will soon release their first HD camcorder to use the AVCHD codec.  According to Akihabara News, Panasonic’s new camcorder will record HD video to SD cards in keeping with the company’s development flash-based devices.  Panasonic’s camcorder will use a 3CCD chip imaging system, and will be compatible with the company’s recently announced 4GB SD card (SDHC) format.  The camcorder will record up to 85 minutes of 6Mbps video, or 55 minutes of 9Mbps video to a 4GB SD card.

In May, Matsushita (Panasonic) and Sony announced that they had co-developed AVCHD, a new high definition format using MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression.  The format is capable of supporting data rates of up to 18Mbps, and was touted at the time as a format that would enable consumer users to record HD video using non-tape-based media – including DVDs.  In July, Sony Became the first company to announce camcorders utilizing the AVCHD format, the HDR-UX1 DVD camcorder, and the HDR-SR1 HDD camcorder.

At the time of the original AVCHD announcement, Panasonic said they planned to introduce camcorders into their product line in late 2006 or early 2007.  In making this morning’s announcement, it is possible that Panasonic is responding to Sony’s rapid deployment of the technology, as well as differentiating their upcoming SD memory card-based product.  In addition to using flash memory, the Panasonic camcorder will use a three-CCD imaging system, in contrast to Sony’s single CMOS sensor implementation in its HDR-UX1 and HDR-SR1 camcorders.  

This reflects the divergent paths taken by Panasonic and Sony in their development of both consumer and prosumer camcorders in recent years.  With last year’s HDR-HC1 (Specs, $2295), Sony became the first company to utilize a CMOS sensor in a consumer camcorder, and has subsequently released a number of consumer and prosumer camcorders equipped with their ClearVID CMOS sensor.  

Panasonic has led the charge in developing flash memory-based camcorders, and last year introduced the ultra-compact three-CCD SDR-S100 (Specs, $1199), followed up by this year’s SDR-S150 (Review, Specs, $699.95).  This year’s model differed little in terms of specifications from the SDR-S100, but added compatibility with Panasonic’s new SDHC card format, which currently supports up to 4GB of memory.  Panasonic has also developed a professional flash memory format, P2, used in its AG-HVX200 prosumer camcorder.  P2 is a proprietary format capable of recording DVCPROHD video, and memory cards supporting P2 are currently available with up to 8GB of storage.