Panasonic launches HDC-HS700, HDC-TM700 Camcorder : – Panasonic launched Tuesday HDC-HS700 and HDC-TM700, two new digital camcorders with 3MOS sensor technology. Both the newly-unveiled camcorders boast the capability of capturing action in FullHD 1080/60p resolution; and feature a 12x optical zoom lens.
The hard-drive-based HDC-HS700 (240GB) and flash-storage-based HDC-TM700 (32GB) also snap 14-megapixel stills and offer additional storage via slots that handle SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards.
Both shoot video at 1080/60p resolution and can shoot 14.2 megapixel still images (and 13.3 megapixel images from recorded video). The cameras boast a high-sensitivity 3MOS sensor system that processes red, green, and blue independently for high quality and low noise.
Both camcorders use H. 264 codec to record MPEG-4 video at a 28-megabits-per-second bit rate, at their highest video resolution and frame rate of 1920-by-1080; and can also shoot 1980-by-1080-resolution AVCHD video at lower bit rates of 17, 13, 9, and 5 mbps.
The HDC-HS700 stores 102 hours of recording (in HE mode) on its HDD, while the 32GB built into the HDC-TM700 are enough for 13 hours and 40 minutes of video recording (in HE mode)
There was no word from Panasonic on pricing or a shipping date, last year’s model, the TM300, retailed for $1,300 at launch.