Panasonic today is now showing products from its earlier take over of Sanyo with five new pocketable camecorders. The WA10 is its star with an Xacti-like design, it can shoot its 1080P, H.264 video for up to an hour underwater at depths of up to 10 feet. In spite of the hardening, it’s low-light friendly with a backside-illuminated, 16-megapixel CMOS sensor that can capture either full resolution stills in pure photography, with a 12X lens, or two-megapixel images while in mid-movie.
The DC10 is an equivalent for regular conditions that shoots with the same amount of visual fidelity but without the ruggedized body. A third model, the DC1, has a 14-megapixel sensor to trim the price.
Panasonic’s Flip units received their own updates. The fixed-zoom TA20 is a direct parallel to the WA10 in the compact world and will survive the same depths as well as drops of up to five feet and dust. A three-inch touchscreen provides the core interface for recording its 720p footage. Its unique trick lets it combine pixel input to shoot video in low light at a reduced 15 frames per second. Connecting through USB will also optionally turn it into a webcam, and a tripod is included either for the webcam or for hands-free self-portraits from the eight-megapixel camera.
Beneath it, the TA2 is a regular version of the TA20 but includes virtually identical features and the tripod but in a lower-cost regular shell.
Ship Dates and Pricing
The cameras don’t have ship dates or prices at this time but will more than likely get those closer to their releases.
