Tweet
Interesting New Nordahl Column: AVCHD & Grass Valley News
The AVC HD camcorders are here, with JPEG2000 right behind.
Panasonic just introduced the world's smallest 3-CCD professional HD camcorder -- offering AVCHD & SecureDigital RAM card, and an external 40GB hard disk recorder included! Last week, Panasonic Broadcast introduced the AG-HSC1U as the world's smallest professional 3-CCD HD camcorder, featuring 1/4" 3-CCD imager and internal recording to removable SD (Secure Digital) RAM card. As I have been pointing out for a year, Panasonic continues to face a serious market problem in that they have no low end HD camcorder for the pro-sumer market, below the HVX200 at about $7,000 including P2 cards. In my opinion, the HSC1U is perhaps a temporary measure to offer their professional dealer channel a HD camcorder package with wide pro-sumer market appeal, particularly to the lower range wedding and events market. This also means, I predict, that Panasonic may announce a HVX200-type product soon with AVCHD and AVC-Intra-50 for about $3,000 to $4,000 (my guess). The HSC1U is slated for March delivery at a US list of $2,099 including 40GB external recorder, 4GB Secure Digital RAM card, and HD Writer cut-edit software.
Good news offsets bad news about HD camcorder from Grass Valley. In a surprise move at the end of January, Grass Valley announced that full deliveries of their new highly publicized Infinity Digital Media Recorder (DMC) would be delayed until summer 2007 (That's the bad news.) The really good news is that GV has decided to fit the DMC with full native HD resolution 3-CMOS imager, enabling full bandwidth 1920x1080 native acquisition and recording. GV has been working on this CMOS imager technology for several years in their own laboratories. The US list price for the DMC will remain at around $23,000 making the DMC highly competitive for high quality ENG as well as for high quality EFP. The DMC records to internal removable CompactFlash RAM cards and to internal removable REVPro hard disk cartridges in the highly efficient JPEG2000 format. Pre-production units will be shown at the NAB.
Jerry Jones
