We've received breaking news straight from Panasonic's Japanese website that the inevitable Panasonic HDC-HS350 is going to join its little brother, the Panasonic HDC-TM300 sometime this year. The big news here is that the Panasonic HDC-HS350 will feature a massive 240GB HDD, joining the Sony HDR-XR520V as co-pilot of the mass storage airship that is engulfing the consumer market. What could one possibly do with 240GB worth of high-definition footage? Furthermore, how does one keep a decent backup cache of all the giant files?
Panasonic conveniently hypes the VW-BN1 DVD recorder to go along with its lineup of HD camcorders, just like Sony, who pushes the DVDirect Express DVD burner on its newly announced HDR-CX520V and HDR-CX500V dual flash memory camcorders. But DVD burning can grow costly and vacuum up too much time, so most consumers will probably end up setting aside a large chunk of their PC hard drives or end up deleting the footage directly from the camcorder. The Panasonic HDC-HS350 will offer the ability to record to an SD/SDHC card, but that's even more video, which translates to more HDD space in the end.
Just like the Panasonic HDC-TM300, the Panasonic HDC-HS350 will have three 1/4.1-inch Live MOS sensors, not to be confused with actual CMOS chips, which we would actually prefer. Live MOS is the cheaper version of a CMOS, so until Panasonic gives us a camcorder with three actual CMOS chips, we'll stick with the Canon HF S10's single massive 1/2.6-inch CMOS, which gave us one of the best performances of the year. A 12x optical zoom, Optical Image Stabilization and 10-megapixel stills will be carried over to the Panasonic HDC-HS350, along with the much welcomed viewfinder and Follow Focus.
Announced for Japan only, the Panasonic HDC-HS350 does not have a US price at the moment, but Panasonic claims the camcorder will ship July 25th.
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