Panasonic Shipping New P2 Camcorder

Panasonic has rolled out a less costly P2 camcorder, designed for all types of ENG assignments.

The new shoulder-mount, low power AJ-SPC700 is a 2/3-inch 520,000-pixel, IT 3-CCD camera with 60 fields interlace recording in 25Mbps DVCPRO/DV and 50 Mbps 4:2:2 DVCPRO50 format on a P2 card. The camcorder offers three recording modes--continuous, pre-record and loop-record--a built-in voice memo mic, shot marker indication on clips of video and thumbnail clip display--the built-in color 3.5-inch LCD monitor enables users to review video clips.

The P2 has two audio input channels, which record onto two audio channels of 48kHz/16-bit PCM audio in DVCPRO50, DVCPRO and DV.

Additionally, users can customize features such as scene files, setup buttons and camera setup memory--up to eight camera eight camera setup can be saved to an SD memory card. The camera has a list price of $12,995.