PANASONIC DROPS PRICE ON NEW HMC40 CAMCORDER
July 21, 2009

PANASONIC DROPS PRICE ON NEW HMC40 CAMCORDER

The HMC40 is a 2.16-pound, HD camcorder with the ability to capture high-quality AVCHD recordings, high-resolution still photos, and professional audio. The camcorder's full HD resolution 3-megapixel 3MOS imager produces 1920x1080 or 1280x720 AVCHD video with high sensitivity. When used for digital still photography, the camera captures 10.6-megapixel resolution directly to the SD card as a JPEG file.

For video recording, the camcorder uses MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 high profile encoding, which provides a near doubling of bandwidth efficiency and improved video performance over the older MPEG-2 compression. The HMC40 records video in all four professional AVCCAM recording modes. Using one 32GB SDHC memory card, a user can record three hours of full resolution 1920x1080 video and audio in PH mode, four hours at HA mode and 5.3 hours at HG mode. In the HE mode, the camera can record up to 12 hours of 1440 x 1080 HD content on a single 32GB SDHC card.

AVCHD is supported by a wide range of editing systems, including Apple Final Cut Pro 6.0.5, Adobe Premier Pro CS4, Edius Pro 5 and EDIUS Neo 2. A free transcoder (www.panasonic.com/avccam) converts AVCHD files to DVCPRO HD P2 and downconverted DV files.