A digital camera….with a lot of zoom. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Panasonic is updating its line of Lumix digital cameras….and camcorders. On the digital still camera side…among the new models is the FZ18….an 8 megapixel camera with an 18X optical zoom…..image stabilization…..and what Panasonic calls Intelligent Scene Selector. Imaging VP Rich Campbell says what that means for consumers is …

"To be able to take a camera like that and to take an image from a fairly long distance away from your subject, one of the biggest challenges consumers have when doing that is that they tend to get a log of blurry photos. So we've been able to compensate for that by having optical image stabilization built into our camera systems as well as intelligent ISO control which compensates for different lighting levels and different adjustments that need to be made to improve your image quality."

Also added is face detection technology…being used by more and more digital camera makers. The FZ18 has a list price of about 400 dollars. On the camcorder side….are new high definition models … the SD5 and SX 5….

"The SD card today allows you to be able to take your video out and put them into any Panasonic device that has an SD card slot, like a flat panel and be able to play your videos straight away."

Prices of HD camcorders are migrating to below a thousand dollars….as more models come out and competition intensifies. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.