Panasonic's HD cams take on low light - win

After today's camera announcements, we're nearing Panasonic overload but we can just about endure a few more flashes of shiny black plastic to bring you news of Panny's new camcorders.

The HDC-SD100 and HDC-HS100 are both AVCHD beauties, shooting 1080i video and packing 12x optical Leica zoom lenses. While the smaller SD saves its footage to SD card, the larger HS prefers to carry its own 60GB hard drive under its shell.

They're the first AVCHD cams to use Panny's 3MOS system, which whips out the three dedicated red, green and blue CCDs used in its previous efforts and replaces them with three very much in vogue CMOS ones. Panasonic reckons it keeps the colour benefits of the old system, while expanding the chips' light receiving area, which, in theory, should make for kick-ass low-light performance.

They'll be dropping by in September but so far we've only got US pricing to go on.

Essentials
Panasonic HDC-HS100, HDC-SD100
Price: £TBA ($1100, $1300 in US)
On sale: September
Contact: Panasonic