Grass Valley parent company Thomson has developed a new 2/3-inch 1920×1080 CMOS sensor, dubbed Xensium, which will be built into the first shipments later this year of Grass Valley's new Infinity Digital Media Camcorder systems. Because Thomson developed the sensor and accompanying image-processing systems at the same time, company executives claimed it would deliver exceptional image quality for the $26,000 price tag of an Infinity (with viewfinder).

The Xensium sensor won't be limited to deployment in the Infinity line – Grass Valley Senior Vice President Jeff Rosica said yesterday that it will be a component of "Infinity and other next-generation camera systems" – but it does give some fresh razzle-dazzle to a camera line that was originally slated to ship in the first quarter of 2006. "We're later than we want to be," Rosica said, calling the delay "disappointing." In response to further questions, he admitted, "We could have been more realistic [in our estimated ship dates]. It was not just a new camera but a new platform."

Grass Valley was a little stingy with further details about Xensium, which comprises fully 2.4 megapixels, saying that more information about the precise arrangement of those pixels would be released at a presentation to be given at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) February 11 in San Francisco.

Besides the Xensium sensor, Grass Valley officials said other improvements to the Infinity design have included an improved cooling system and a reduction in power consumption. They also reminded attendees that the camera will support recording to CompactFlash media, making the obvious comparison to Panasonic's solid-state P2 recording system.

The Infinity is currently being beta-tested in the field by what Rosica described as "major, very large news broadcasters," although he didn't disclose their identities. A working pre-production model is scheduled to be on display at NAB, with some 100 units to be deployed for evaluation and testing after the show. A special factory has been built to manufacture the Infinity, which is slated to ship to customers beginning near the end of the second quarter.

Grass Valley's Ronny van Geel ran down more Infinity-related news. First, he described a product Fast Forward Video plans to launch at NAB: a "camera backpack" that fits between the back of an analog camera and its battery, converts the signal to digital, and records it to a Rev Pro disk, making legacy cameras forward-compatible with a Rev Pro-based workflow.

Next, van Geel described the new LCP400 software that Grass Valley will offer, which allows the Infinity camera to be controlled from a smartphone or PDA running Windows Mobile 5. The $499 LCP400 program will support metadata input, the addition of markers of interest, and operation of video and audio controls via Bluetooth.

The company also touted the Flip4Mac MXF product line from Telestream, which supports random-access flie transfer of DV25 video into Final Cut Pro for editing. An Infinity component for Flip4Mac will be available "soon," Grass Valley said.

There was more news, too, but touched upon only briefly at the press event. The Grass Valley Spirit HD telecine (starts at $698,000) is a new film scanner that supports SD and HD scanning in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 color space and can be upgraded to 2K or 4K in the field. It's slated to ship in February, and you can see it at NAB.

There's also a new single-format HD camera, the "Mark II" version of the two-year-old LDK 4000, which boasts 14-bit A-to-D conversion and other signal processing characteristics of its big brother, the LDK 8000, in either 1080i or 720p configurations. It's $98,000 to start, and ships in the first quarter of this year.