Panasonic drew back the curtain on a pair of new high-end HD camcorders today: the HDC-HS700 and the HDC-TM700. Both record at 1920 x 1080 at 60 fps and use three CMOS sensors, one for each of the primary colors (red, blue and green). You're able to snap 14-megapixel still photos and Panasonic says it's overcome any worries about digital noise produced by all these pixels with internal processing (we'll see).
Both models mark the debut of a new F1.5 (46mm) 12x optical zoom Leica Dicomor lens, and also feature a 3-inch touch screen display, manual controls, an electronic viewfinder, optical image stabilization, face detection and face recognition (which enables the camcorder to register faces and optimize focus on them the next time they enter the frame).
The principle difference between the two models is recording format. The HS700 records to a 240GB hard drive or SDHC/SDXC cards while the the TM700 has 32GB of built-in flash memory and memory card recording. No prices were announced yet for either model, but they'll be flagship products so probably north of $800 if I had to guess.
Prices have been announced for the six models it introduced at the CES show (which you can read about here). They are:
- $529 for the HDC-TM55;
- $699 for the HDC-HS60
- $499 for the HDC-SD60.
- $349 for the SDR-H85
- $269 for the SDR-T50
- $249 for the SDR-S50.
(The HS700. Photo courtesy Panasonic)
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