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Pocket Sized Digital Camcorder From Panasonic

Techstination feature for Wednesday, September 17, 2003

A digital camcorder in your pocket. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. It uses an SD memory card instead of a traditional cassette tape... .and it can capture DVD quality video. Panasonic has announced what it calls the D-Snap camcorder. VP Andy Nelkin...

"This is really an industry first and never before has the market seen this technology because only Panasonic has the ability to bring the very bit intensive stream of video from MPEG 2 DVD quality video onto a card."

The camera can also record in Internet quality MPEG 4. Given the constraints of the current SD memory cards available, that mode seems much more practical. For instance... one 512 megabyte SD memory card... that ships with the camera... will record only ten minutes of the highest quality video... but can capture 70 minutes in the best MPEG 4 mode. About the market for it, Nelkin says... .

"The really unique part about this camcorder is because it uses the SD media, you can now have a network set up with our new DVD recorder where you will be able to take the card directly out of our camcorder, put it into the DVD recorder and then save it and archive it on DVD RAM."

The transfer process is faster than it would be a digital video tape cassette. As memory card capacity goes up... and prices come down... recording DVD quality video will make more sense. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.