Panasonic & Sony Announce DVD Camcorders

January 2003: Hitachi is no longer the only company with DVD camcorders (although it”s still the only one offering them in Australia). Both Panasonic and Sony announced new DVD camcorders at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In both cases, the units were developed for the Japanese/North American market and no release dates have yet been announced for Australia.

Panasonic”s VDR-M30 DVD camcorder can record digital video and still images onto removable 8cm DVD-RAM and DVD-R discs and includes an SD Memory Card slot. Disks can be played back on the majority of DVD-R compatible MPEG2-conforming devices and the camcorder features a range of non-linear editing functions that make it easy to produce finished videos for sharing.

Camera features include a colour viewfinder, 10x optical zoom lens, 240x digital zoom and digital electronic image stabilisation. Up to an hour of video can be recorded on a single disk. It is expected to sell in the USA for around $US899 ($A1,546) and is scheduled for release in the second quarter of the year.

Sony has announced three new DVD camcorders that use the same media types and are compatible with most home DVD players and the latest PlayStation2 game consoles. All feature Carl Zeiss lenses and offer a JPEG capture mode for still images.

The new DCR-DVD100 model can capture still images at 640 x 480 pixel resolution, while the DCR-DVD200 and DCR-DVD300 models incorporate a one-megapixel imager and produce higher quality video plus still image resolution of 1152 x 864 pixels. Like the Panasonic model, they feature easy in-camera editing and high storage capacity. They are scheduled for release mid-year at prices starting from around $US1,000 ($A1,719).