Photos: Hands-on with the 3MOS Panasonic HDC-HS100

The Panasonic HDC-HS100 we first met in Monte Carlo has arrived in Crave Towers with a raft of features, and even sporting a new name for this type of camcorder. It's a three CMOS model, or '3MOS' -- ooh, that's clever -- because it utilises three, 1/6-inch 'Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor' imaging sensors. Three CCD models are designed to absorb red, green or blue on each individual sensor, giving richer colour information than a single sensor, and 3MOS works on the same principle. Each sensor packs 610,000-pixels.

Video is recorded in AVCHD format, at full high definition 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. It's stored on a 60GB hard disk drive, which isn't the biggest on the market, but still holds two minutes shy of 8 hours-worth of HD footage.

Our favourite feature is the lens ring on the Leica Dicomar Lens. It boasts a 12x optical zoom, which can be controlled by the zoom rocker at the back of the camera, or with the lens ring. A quick push of a switch at the front, and the lens ring allows you to focus manually, with the centre of the frame magnified on screen for fine adjustment.

The Panasonic HDC-HS100 is available for as little £610 online. To find out if it's the 3MOS with the most-est -- er, that didn't work, but we'll just gloss over it -- click through the photos for a closer look, and an HDMI surprise. -Rich Trenholm

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