Panasonic announced the AG-HSC1U which is probably the first AVCHD Pro camcorder as well as the world’s smallest 3-CCD professional HD camcorder.
The Panasonic AG-HSC1U has 3 1/4″ CCDs and a f/1.6 Leica Dicomar lens with optical image stabilization.
The AG-HSC1U marks the first time that AVCHD has used on a “professional camcorder. AVCHD or Advanced Video Codec High Definition is a flavor of H.264/AVC MPEG-4 encoding that has been optimized for camcorders. AVCHD was introduced in mid-2005 by its joint developers Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic’s parent company) as a new high definition format for DVD, HDD and memory card recording. The AVCHD standard has a bit rate ceiling of around 24 Mbps, but to date it has only been implemented at bit rates up to 15 Mbps.
