Panasonic AG-HSC1U AVCHD Camcorder

[Multimedia]

Panasonic AG-HSC1U - Three 1/4" CCDs about the same size as the HC7. $2099 list. I may have to buy one of these as well. HDMI out. Manual Audio Gain with external audio IN. This is a serious Sony HDR-HC7 competitor. Street will likely be little more than $1500.

This camera comes with a 40GB HDD they call a SD or "Store Drive" and a 4GB SDHC Memory Card for that price. Writes to the SDHC Card at 88 minutes/4GB and you can copy your recoerdings to the 40GB Store Drive. You can't write to the SD directly. It uses a MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression scheme so HC7 is still way better as its compression scheme is much lower @ 25mbps or about 18 minutes/4GB of HDV tape space.. But it's not clear yet that will always be the case. I wonder how low can you set the compression scheme? If it can record over 30mbps then it's a serious HDV competitor. It's supposed to ship THIS MONTH of March 2007. Edited files are Blu-ray ready to be burned that way.

There is an iMovie 6 MPEG-4 project video format option that might be compatible with these camera's files. It communicates via HDMI and USB2 ports on its right side just in front of the handstrap under a rubber hood. Looks very promising. Weighs 1.1 pounds.

So this looks like the race is really on now. I found this on page 13 of the new April issue of DV Magazine.

 

[Multimedia]

Camcorderinfo.com's First Impressions

Camcorderinfo.com's First Impression Review from February 5th.

The AG-HSC1U marks the first time that AVCHD has used on a "professional camcorder." AVCHD or Advanced Video Codec High Definition is a flavor of H.264/AVC MPEG-4 encoding that has been optimized for camcorders. AVCHD was introduced in mid-2005 by its joint developers Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic’s parent company) as a new high definition format for DVD, HDD and memory card recording. The AVCHD standard has a bit rate ceiling of around 24 Mbps, but to date it has only been implemented at bit rates up to 15 Mbps.

Here's two more shots of the camera plus the .7 wide angle lens kit.

 

[tilman]

Beware! It is my understanding that AVCHD editing options on a computer are extremely limited at the moment, with no support at all on the Mac. This is not the same H.264 flavor that Apple is using in its products, and Apple isn't even listed as a supporter of this format on the official AVCHD information web site.

 

[Multimedia]

AVCHD Is Not Ready For Mac Yet But May Be Soon

Beware! It is my understanding that AVCHD editing options on a computer are extremely limited at the moment, with no support at all on the Mac. This is not the same H.264 flavor that Apple is using in its products, and Apple isn't even listed as a supporter of this format on the official AVCHD information web site.

Absolutely. But that may all melt away on April 15 or worst case when Leopard and iLife '07 ship.

But the Sony HDR-HC7 Still Wins The Best Picture Contest:

Video is recorded in 1080i, and like DV encoding, HDV shares a fixed data rate of 25Mbps, at a 5:1 compression. In our tests, AVCHD video shared the exceptional resolution of HDV video but suffered from noise to a much greater degree. This contrast is analogous to the performance difference seen in standard definition DVD camcorders as compared to their MiniDV counterparts. In both cases, the non-tape format relies on more aggressive compression, trading off the increased noise and artifacts for smaller file sizes that fit onto DVDs and HDDs. Given this, we expect the HDR-HC7 to be Sony’s top-performing consumer HD camcorder of the year. HDV is a higher quality compression with several years of third-party support. Link

At 88min/4GB SDHC module vs. 18min/4GB of HDV Tape this puts the AG-HSC1U bitrate at around 5mbps vs the 25mbps HDV rate. Seems like an impossably low bitrate compared to the maximum AVCHD bitrate of 24mbps.

The bitrate thing doesn't denote quality. AVCHD has a theoretically better codec (H.264) than HDV (MPEG2). All the difference will be in the implementation. If AVCHD is done well with a great encoder chip in the camera, with all other things being equal (CCD/CMOS, optics, etc.), AVCHD should be higher quality than HDV.

DV's bitrate is 25mb/s but I prefer HDV.