New Panasonic HDC-HS700

[Martin Kucera]

BH store just posted a link to a new Panasonic HS700 that will be able to record in 1080/60p. No arrival time announced yet. Should be amazing in low light as well.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...c_HDC_HS700_HDC_HS700_HD_240GB_CAMCORDER.html

 

[Scott Weberpal]

Should be amazing in low light as well.

With 1/4" chips, I can't imagine the low-light will be all that great, even though Panasonic claims an increase in sensitivity over last years 1/4" chips. I'm holding out for the Canon Vixia HF S21 which is due out in April. Because I don't want a hard drive camcorder (too many moving parts to fail), I naturally chose the HF S21 because of the 64 GB flash memory with 2 SD slots (up to 128 GB) whereas most camcorder only have 32 GB and 1 expandable slot.

The HF S21 also have a much larger chip 1/2.6" which will drastically improve low-light performance over any camcorder with a 1/4" chip. If you ever want to compare low-light performance, just go do Vimeo or Youtube and do a search for that camcorder. There are usually a ton of videos with low-light. Just make sure the video is in HD or you might miss noise with the larger pixel size of the lower quality video. Essentially anything short of a Canon XH A1 or Sony HDR-FX1 or FX1000 or another $3000-$4000 camcorder is not going to have amazing low light capabilities.

I'll probably search out a used HDR-FX7 simply for the zoom qualities (20x vs 10x or 12x that most others are).

 

[Martin Kucera]

Good points, Scott. I've never shot on Panasonic consumer cams myself, will go with the Sony NX5U for the upcoming season anyway. Lets see where their claims stand when reviews come out on the HS700. The 1080/60p seems to be what the buzz is all about when it comes to this consumer model.
These days, the A1, FX1 or FX1000 are just about on their way out when it comes to broadcast quality low light performance.