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Panasonic's Spring camcorders: Three chips and long lenses
Before the world went high-def, Panasonic made a point of upgrading many of its camcorders to 3-chip models; now it's happening again, as Panasonic rolls out its 3MOS chipsets in its prosumer 2009 AVCHD camcorders. And at 2 megapixels per chip, they're each reasonably high-resolution, as well. However, you won't see the likes of popular, older, budget 3-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--and Panasonic even showed footage of the moon for astronomy buffs--but is that really a mass market? And no matter how good its image stabilization 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 are more of the same: more space on hard disk models, more built-in memory for flash models (and for a couple of models, more compact), as well as some tweaks to face detection. And in the case of its everything-resistant models, the SW series, they just got a little tougher.
Senior Editor Lori Grunin has been covering digital imaging for two decades, but her memory's kind of sketchy on the details. You can hear about it every week on Indecent Exposure, the podcast she co-hosts with Matt Fitzgerald. 
