Panasonic Rumored to Announce PV-DV953 in US in November replacing PV-DV952, possibly US version of Japanese Pixel Shifting High Resolution Still NV-MX5000 by Robin Liss Published on Oct 21, 2002 12:00 AM

An anonymous reliable source has informed Camcorderinfo.com that Pansonic will be announcing a new, 3CCD camcorder in November, with model number PV-DV953 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $899.88). Although the source was unable to confirm it, we suspect that the camcorder is the US version of the NV-MX5000, announced in Japan earlier this year.

According to our source, the PV-DV952 is on short supply. The short supply is most likely because it is not being manufactured any more, meaning that Panasonic is preparing to either phase it out, or more likely, replace it. Often camcorders are released at industry shows or conferences, however there are no major conferences in Novemeber that would coincide with the announement of the PV-DV953. The PV-DV953 will replace the PV-DV952 which was anounced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last year.

We believe that the camcorder is most likely the NV-MX5000. Panasonic is most likely hoping that the new camcorder will compete with the Sony TRV950 and Canon GL2, both of which were announced in the past 6 months. If the camcorder is the NV-MX5000, we can assume that most of the specs will be the same. The zoom on the NV-MX5000 is 10x optical. The MV-MX5000 has 3 CCDs at around 800K pixel resolution each. Each CCD has 640K effective video resolution and 700K effective still resolution. The NV-MX5000 uses pixel shifting technology to achieve a still resolution of 2,048 x x 1496 the highest resolution of a MiniDV camcorder (the Sony MicroMV DCR-IP220, which is yet to be available to the public, has a 2 MegaPixel CCD and can shoot higher resolution stills)

We also do not know if Panasonic will just be announcing the PV-DV952, or if they will be updating other models in there line at the same time. Usually camcorder companies, including Panasonic announce all or part of the camcorder line at the same time. The last time Panasonic announced new versions of the PV-DV model line was in January at CES so it would not be unthinkable for them to announce replacements in November of this year. Camcorderinfo.com is working on this story and will release any details as they are made available to us.