Panasonic's spring camcorders get three chips and long lenses

Before the world went high-def, Panasonic made a point of upgrading many of its camcorders to three-chip models. Now it's happening again, as Panasonic rolls out its 3MOS chipsets in its prosumer 2009 AVCHD camcorders. At 2 megapixels per chip, they're each reasonably high-resolution, as well.

You won't, however, see the likes of popular, older, budget three-chip models, such as the PV-GS320 -- at least not in the first half of the year. In fact, you won't see any tape- or DVD-based models at all from Panasonic, according to the company. Ever.

For its standard-definition clients, Panasonic now zooms out to 70x. On one hand, these stalker zoom lenses can be quite useful for recording wildlife, for example, but that's not really a mass market. Also, no matter how good image stabilisation is, you're going to have to shoot using a tripod at lengths like that.

As expected, the rest of both the HD and standard-def lines is more of the same: more space on hard-disk models and more built-in memory for flash models, as well as some tweaks to face detection. In the case of Panasonic's everything-resistant models -- the SW series -- they just got a little tougher.

Shown above is the Panasonic SDR-H80.