Panasonic Unveils AG-HSC1U First AVCHD Pro Camcorder

Panasonic has annonunced the release of the AG-HSC1U, reported to be the world's smallest 3-CCD professional HD camcorder. The unit records to SDHC flash cards in the AVCHD format. Weighing in at a mere 1.12 pounds and recording to a format largely regarded as consumer rather than professional, the AG-HSC1 appears to be nearly identical to the HDC-SD1. The big difference - a portable 40GB hard drive that can store the contents of the SD cards and a color space more closely matched to their pro camcorders.

The AG-HSC1U features three 1/4" CCDs, each native 16:9, a f/1.8 Leica Dicomar lens, and optical image stabilization. This is the same chip array and lens as the consumer grade HDC-SD1.

Rather than competing with their established professional camcorders, Panasonic is marketing this product as a back-up, something that can fit in a glove compartment of any producer. "Everyone I show it to says, 'I want one,'" stated Panasonic Product Line Business Manager SteveGolub.

"The video image has been optimized to match our professional camcorders," continued Golub. Though it may not have many differences outside - except for a non-reflective grey paint job - the AG-HSC1U has a different chroma, gamma, and knee than its consumer equivalent. The result should be an image that appears less saturated, and more closely aligned with more expensive camcorders like the AG-HVX200.

The included 40GB HDD

Though it hardly looks the part of a professional camcorder, the AG-HSC1U does have niche applications for videographers, including surveillence, scientific, and nature shooting, due to the small size and silent operation.

The camcorder ships with a single 4GB SDHC card and the 40GB portable hard drive. It does not appear that the HSC1U can record directly to the hard drive. Rather, the hard drive can only act as a storage unit for SDHC cards once they're full. A 4GB cards holds about 88 minutes of video.

The AG-HSC1U marks the first time that AVCHD has used on a "professional camcorder."  AVCHD or Advanced Video Codec High Definition is a flavor of H.264/AVC MPEG-4 encoding that has been optimized for camcorders. AVCHD was introduced in mid-2005 by its joint developers Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic’s parent company) as a new high definition format for DVD, HDD and memory card recording.  The AVCHD standard has a bit rate ceiling of around 24 Mbps, but to date it has only been implemented at bit rates up to 15 Mbps.

In late 2006, we tested the first AVCHD camcorders to reach the consumer market, Sony’s DVD-based HDR-UX1 and HDD-based HDR-SR1 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1119.99). The images produced by these freshman AVCHD efforts were very sharp, with resolution comparable to HDV camcorders, but they showed more noise.  The increased noise is likely a byproduct of the AVCHD codec’s higher compression levels versus 25 Mbps HDV, and the format’s youth. 

AVCHD is not yet well-supported by third-party software companies with no major NLE (non-linear editor) support to date, raising questions about workflow for the AG-HSC1U.  The AG-HSC1U will ship with HD Writer version 1.0 software, though details on the software's featrures are were not announced.  The camcorder is slated for availability in the US beginning in March, at an MSRP of $2,099.