Panasonic rolls out AG-HMC40 AVCCAM handheld camcorder

Panasonic introduced the AG-HMC40 to its AVCCAM line of camcorders at the NAB Show.

Weighing less than 2.2lbs, the new AVCCAM camcorder offers full HD 3MOS imagers, 10.6-megapixel still photo capture, 12x optical zoom and solid-state AVCHD recording on SD cards.

The HMC40 is an AVCHD format-based camcorder that uses MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 high-profile encoding, which provides a near doubling of bandwidth efficiency and improved video performance over older MPEG-2 compression formats.

The HD camcorder records in four professional AVCCAM recording modes: PH mode (average 21Mb/s, max 24Mb/s); HA mode (about 17Mb/s); HG mode (about 13Mb/s); and HE mode (about 6Mb/s). It supports 1080/59.94i in all modes and 1080/29.97p, 1080/23.98p native, 720/59.94p, 720/20.97p, and 720/23.98p native in PH mode only.