Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic) has developed an AVCHD digital camcorder able to record HDTV video on SD memory cards.

 

September 30, 2006: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic) has developed an AVCHD digital camcorder able to record HDTV video on SD memory cards.
AVCHD, which was launched six months ago, is a high definition format for 8cm DVD, flash memory cards and hard disk drive media. Sony was the first manufacturer to release an AVCHD camcorder, with its HDR-UX1 model, which records to DVD, reaching stores last month. The new Panasonic camcorder will be the world’s first AVCHD camcorder that uses SD memory cards for storage. It is scheduled for release by the end of 2006. No product photographs have been released yet as far as we know.
A prototype will be presented at the “CEATEC Japan 2006” show, which opens on 3 October, 2006. It features three CCD sensors plus a new image signal processing LSI that supports MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoding. Using a 4 GB SD memory card, the camcorder can record approximately 85 minutes of HDTV quality video at an encoding rate of 6 Mbps or 55 minutes at 9 Mbps. The company plans to continue the development of another model able to record onto 8cm DVD discs.