Watch the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs interview by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in its entirety from the All Things Digital Conference. Videos below are in order top to bottom. Sorry about the Brightcove player and embedded ads. I guess they have bills to pay…
This is a video that’s made its rounds on the web for a couple of weeks. I just found it and its pretty hilarious…
According to TechOn out of Japan, the main difference between the HDC-SD1 versus the HDC-SD3 specifically is the H.264 codec LSI (large scale integration) chip. Prior to the SD3, a powerful enough LSI chip was not available to encode the images in full 1920×1080i in H.264 compression so the image was scaled down to 1440×1080 prior to scaling back up after the compression. The “Full HD” description in the SD3 is describing the inclusion of a newer LSI chip that allows the camera to fully take advantage of the optics without degrading the image quality first. Sounds like to me it is a worth while improvement. I still have not seem any comparisons of actual footage but if you can wait to buy your camcorder, it will probably be worth it.
Just a couple days after I bought my Panasonic HDC-SD1 they already announced the release of its successor. The HDC-SD3. Looks like it is pretty much the same as the SD1 but with slightly better image quality. watch.impress.co.jp has a write up about the differences in Japanese with lots of photos. In a couple of the photos you can see the external battery pack I mentioned in the last post for extended use. Looks like the accessories will be compatible with both cameras. It still does not look like there are any software improvements to the editing predicament most SD1 owners are currently having to deal with.
I have been shooting a lot of footage with my SD1 and so far I am thoroughly impressed. I can’t imagine the SD3 have any noticeable image quality improvement but if you can wait 6 months maybe the a SD3 is in your future. It claims to have “Full HD 1920″ which means the SD1 achieves its 1920 frame with some kind of software trickery. That’s if you buy into the fact that it 1080 interlaced is “Full HD” versus 1080 progressive (“Fuller” HD?). It gets released in Japan on April 25th with a slightly lower price tag than then the SD1 came out (50 U.S. buckaroos) so look for it around you U.S. neighborhood probably around mid summer. I probably wouldn’t have been able to wait that long anyways to make my purchase so no regrets here. Yet.
Here are some of the photos courtesy of watch.impress.co.jp:
