How much camera can $10,000 buy you? That’s the question Panasonic says it set out to answer when it started designing the new AG-HPX300, its latest AVC-Intra enabled salvo against the MPEG-2 contingent. The new 1080i/p/720p camera, which lists for $10,700 with an interchangable 17x HD Fujinon lens and is slated to start shipping in March, is built around a 1/3-inch, 2.2-megapixel progressive-scan imager and records video in variable frame rates in the AVC-Intra, DVCPRO HD, DVCPRO and DV formats.

That price point is significant because it represents a new entry point for AVC-Intra recording, which Panasonic is pushing hard as the obvious next-generation improvement on the well-established MPEG-2 codec. Along with the HPX300 – which is aimed directly at videographers who are ready to start making tentative moves into solid-state recording – Panasonic announced a number of other new products, from field recorders to spiffy color viewfinders, as it sought to establish new "bridges"  from long-established workflows to a P2 environment.

“It’s a real camera,” said Panasonic Broadcast’s director of product marketing, Joseph Facchini, introducing the HPX300 at a pre-NAB press briefing in New York City today. The HPX300 is a lightweight, low-profile shoulder-mount camera that Facchini said was designed with the mandate that it would handle interchangeable lenses gracefully, maximizing stability and comfort for the operator. And Facchini said the sensor, built using Panasonic’s new MOS technology and dubbed “3MOS” because it uses a different MOS device for red, green and blue image capture, is “as sensitive as other, much lower-density 1/3-inch imagers.”

The camera also uses Panasonic’s Chromatic Aberration Compensation technology, borrowed from its Varicam cousins, to reduce artifacts between the lens and the camera. And it has Dynamic Range Stretch to partially compensate for unusually high and low light levels within the same frame. It has a ½-inch LCOS color viewfinder and a 3.2-inch LCD monitor on the side panel, and new focus-assist functionality. The camera can record variable frame rates in 720p mode, in steps between 12p and 60p. In its 1080/480 24pA mode, it can be set to employ 2:3:3:2 pulldown, which makes it easier for NLEs to extract 24-frame footage on ingest.

The camera has two P2 slots, meaning that it can be loaded with 64 GB P2 cards for a total of 128 GB in recording capacity. Panasonic is also aiming to keep the cost of a studio configuration down, offering a package with base station, camera adapter, and handheld remote for “about $10,000.”

Also introduced at the event was the AG-HPG20 field recorder ($5295, March), which has two P2 slots as well as HD-SDI and FireWire input and supports AVC-Intra, DVCPRO HD, and SD recording. This allows users of legacy HD-SDI cameras, for instance, to transition those cameras to a P2 AVC-Intra workflow for the sake of efficiency. The recorder acts as a USB 2.0 host, meaning that data can be easily offloaded to a portable hard disk.

The AJ-PCD35 P2 Memory Card Drive ($2190, now shipping) offers five P2 slots with a PCIexpress bus for additional bandwidth. It’s a key component of the new AJ-HRW10 P2 Rapid Writer, which has a PCD35 drive built in, along with slots for two 3.5-inch disk drives and a Gigabit Ethernet port to speed up data transfer from P2 cards, offloading up to five P2 cards at a time. It also has a five-inch touch-screen display that shows thumbnails and metadata.

For more information: www.panasonic.com/broadcast