Panasonic HDC-SD5 – The Worlds Most Compact HD Camcorder

With electronics manufactures ceaselessly competing amongst themselves to produce ever more compact gadgets, Panasonic has today served to lay down the gauntlet for the worlds most compact full spec HD camcorder in the form of its 3CCD High Definition HDC-SD5 Camcorder.

Weighing in at only 0.75lb and measuring a mere 2.6 x 2.6 x 5.3 inches, the Panasonic HDC-SD5 HD Camcorder comes with a 560kx3 1/6 inch CCD image sensor offering 520kx3 motion and still image capture at true 16:9 aspect ratios, a x10 optical power zoom coupled to x25-x700 digital magnification, MPEG-4/H.264 AVCHD compliant encoding and full Dolby Digital AC3 stereo audio compression.

You can drill down on the Panasonic HDC-SD5’s full specifications below, however, what with the HDC-SD5 being stated as becoming available from September it will be interesting to see how it fairs against the recently announced and previously featured Hitachi HD Blue Ray Camcorder that offers up to 7GB of on-board storage – especially when you consider that the HDC-SD5 appears to be wholly reliant on SD and SDHC memory cards.

That said, details concerning hitachi’s offering remain fairly scant at the time of writing and whether it quite manages its cited Autumn release date is, at this juncture, wholly open to question.

The Panasonic HDC-SD5 will retail for around $999.95.

Signal system 1080 lines, 60 fields Weight (w/o Battery) 0.75 lb Dimensions (W x H x D) 2.6 x 2.6 x 5.3 inch
Image sensor
1/6-inch CCD image sensor
Total pixels: 560 k x 3
Effective pixels
Motion Picture: 520 k x 3(16:9)
Still Picture: 520 k x 3 (16:9)
Lens
Auto iris, 10x power zoom
F 1.8 to 2.8 (f = 3.0 to 30.0mm)
35mm equivalent
Motion picture: 42.9 to 429 mm (16:9)
Still picture: 42.9 to 429 mm (16:9)
Filter diameter 37 mm
Zoom 10x optical zoom, 25/700x digital zoom
Monitor 2.7” wide LCD monitor (approx. 300 k pixels)
Microphone Stereo Zoom Microphone
Speaker Dynamic type
White balance adjustment Auto / White Set / Outdoor / Indoor (with IR sensor)
Standard illumination 1,400 lux
Minimum required illumination 5 lux (1/30 low light mode) (1 lux in Magic pix mode)
High-speed shutter 1/30 - 1/8000 (Motion Picture), 1/30-1/8000 (Still Picture)
Recording media SD Memory Card, SDHC Memory Card
USB Card reader / writer function ( No copyright protection support)
High-Speed USB (USB2.0) (miniAB)
Pict Bridge-compliant
Flash Available flash range: approx. 1m to 2.5m
Standard accessories AC Adaptor, Battery Pack, IR Remote Controller, USB Cable,
component Cable, AV-Cable, CD-ROM (HD Writer Ver 2.0)

Motion pictures
Compression MPEG4-AVC/H.264 (AVCHD standard compliant)
Transfer rate HG: approx. 13 Mbps (CBR)/ HN: approx. 9 Mbps (VBR)/
HE: approx. 6 Mbps (VBR)
Picture size HG: 1920 x 1080, HN/HE: 1440 x 1080
Audio compression Dolby Digital (Dolby AC3)/ 2ch

Still pictures
Compression JPEG (DCF/Exif2.2 compliant)
Picture size 1920 x 1080 / 2.1MEGA (16:9)
HE: approx. 6

[Source | Gizmodo]