Camcorder News

Panasonic Japan has announced the NV-GS100K, a three chip MiniDV camcorder. The NV-GS100K is Panasonic's third sub $1,500 consumer three chip camcorder announced this year.

The NV-GS100K features three 1/6 in. 800K pixel CCDS, with 600K effective pixels for video and 700K effective pixels for stills. The camcorder has Mega Optical Image Stabilization and it looks as though it features a focus ring.

The NV-GS100K's Leica lens uses ''disperssed glass'' and has special coatings on the lenses which apparently reduce chromatic abberation. It appears that the camcorder can also shoot in 30 frames per second progressive scan mode.

The camcorder apparently uses pixels shifting for digital stills, which the PV-GS70 and the PV-DV953, Panasonic's two other bargain 3 Chip camcorders use, to achieve an overal still resolution of 3.1 Mega Pixels and 2,048 x 1,512 pixel resolution stills. The camcorder can record stills to SD cards, and it can also record MPEG-4 videos.

It appears that the new camcorder implements ''Pixel Interpolation'' to improve the video quality in low light. It's very hard to understand what this feature is, because the information is taken from a Japanese press release - however it seems that the NV-GS100K uses the three chips, possibly in an overlay mode, to do ''new 3 dimensional noise reduction.''

The NV-GS100K comes both in black and silver. The camcorder will be available in Japan on July 10th for 170,000 yen - which is $1,440.70 US dollars. It is known when or if the camcorder will be available in the US. Panasonic seems to be the least consistent in releasing their Japanese models into the US. Most of the US camcorders have Japanese equivelent, however some Japanese models don't make it over here.