Panasonic has ripped the wrappers off the world’s first Micro Four Thirds camcorder. The Panasonic AG-AF100 is a professional-grade model with a lens mount capable of taking the entire range of Micro Four Thirds glass.
Panasonic and Olympus both offer a decent selection of Micro Four Thirds lenses for their stills cameras like the Panasonic GF1 and Olympus E-PL1, and with a mount adapter uses of the Panasonic AG-AF100 will also be able to mount regular Four Thirds lenses, or even lenses make by other companies like Nikon, Canon and Leica. That gives filmmakers the opportunity to shoot some beautifully creative stuff – and all for a consumer-friendly price.
The Panasonic AG-AF100 also boasts an SLR-sized image sensor, which together with the lenses allows for a short depth of field (giving home-shot movies that Hollywood sheen), as well as meaning less noise in low light footage. It also has an HD-SDI output for sending uncompressed video to a computer for editing.
For regular video capture, users can choose between 1080i and 720p AVCHD footage, running at 60fps. There are dual SDXC card slots, which currently means you can have a maximum of 128GB of storage space on board – and that will increase as SDXC card capacity grows.
Panasonic hasn’t announced a price for the Panasonic AG-AF100 just yet, but we’d expect it to be reasonably affordable by pro camcorder standards: the company is pitching the device at “independent filmmakers” who don’t have the budget to splash out on the really expensive pro gear.
Out TBC | £TBC | Panasonic (via Electronista)
