Panasonic's DVD cams
You can’t accuse Panasonic of bandwagon jumping. It had a DVD camcorder long before they were fashionable. Now it has a pair of new models. Set to launch in the UK this month the (£500) VDR-M55B and (£600) VDR-M75B both archive footage to DVD-RAM discs. The downside of this is that these discs are only compatible with Panasonic (and a couple of other makers) DVD players. The pair, which are smaller and lighter (they weigh around 440 grams) than their predecessors, can also take VGA still images which are saved on to either the DVD-RAM disc or an SD card. The camcorders are fairly similar though the higher specified VDR-M75 has a resolution of 1.3 mega pixels and a 24x optical zoom, compared with 800,000 pixels resolution and 10x optical zoom of the VDR-M55.
