World's first hands on review of Panasonic HDC-SDT750

This is a little rushed, as I have to take Oscar for his jabs today!

Today Panasonic announced their new consumer 3D camcorder.

Sometimes, when the wind is right, I get to try out pre production prototypes before the likes of Philip Bloom or Vincent Laforet get their hands on them. I got to play with one of these last week.

Two things come to mind.

1. It's fantastic
2. I hate it.*

I've been shooting 3D since buying my first Bolex 16mm with stereo lens in 1989. It's a fun and challenging pastime. 3D has always been a fairly complicated affair. It takes a lot of specialist equipment, time to calculate inter axial distances, planning for stereo window violations, convergence, depth budgets, camera sync etc. All this means that simply put, not many people know how to do it properly.

Now along come Panasonic with this point and shoot camera that delivers stunning 3D images with no need for any special 3D knowledge. Suddenly it becomes difficult to persuade clients that there is a dark art to 3D.**

Ok, so this £1300 camcorder is not about to replace a dual Red system or Arri Alexia, but for weddings, babies, parties, holidays and low budget film makers, 3D is now a very viable option.

How it works.

3D is accomplished by a newly designed lens system that attaches to the front of the camera along with some nifty processing within the camera body. There are two locating pins on the lens which tell the camera to switch into 3D mode.
The attachment actually houses two separate auto focus lenses that resolve left and right images side by side onto the sensor as two 16:9 images. This means both 'eyes' are captured at exactly the same moment so it is possible to film fast action without trouble.

It's not technically capturing 1080p in 3D mode as only half the resolution from each side of the sensor is used for each eye. This is not as bad at it might sound - all the 3D broadcasts from Sky etc. use this method to squeeze two images into one for 3D. A 3D capable TV will recognize the image as 3D and stretch each eye back to 1920x1080.

Something I've noticed from digital 3D editing is that when the brain is delivered two images it somehow averages out any noise or picture artefacts. Although the image produced by the HDC-SDT750 has technically been upsampled to give 1080p, the perceived image quality is much better than you might expect and far better than a 2D image would be if upsampled to the same degree.

Up close and personal

The distance between the lenses (Inter axial distance) is around 20mm which means it is possible to film objects as close as 1m, a feat that would otherwise require a hugely complicated and expensive mirror rig. Even the professional $21,000 AG3DA1 3D camcorder cannot shoot as close as this. In my experiments I found you could actually get as close as 40cms as long as your close subject didn't cover the edges of the picture. This results in negative parallax, or the 'things poking out of the screen at you' effect.

Other features

Aside from 3D, the camera body is pretty much state of the art. I won't go into these in detail but I will give you a somewhat lazy list.
Optical image stabilisation, touch screen control, leica lens, time lapse recording, manual control ring for focus/exposure, 1080p@50fps (first of it's kind to offer this), pre rec (camera can be set to always be recording, so if you miss a goal then hit record it will 'backdate' the start by 3 seconds and you get your shot!)

What can you do with the footage?
As it's AVCHD you can burn it straight to bluray and it will playback in 3D on a 3D TV. Panasonic also include software to edit and make standard DVDs.
You can also shoot best in class 2D video by simply removing the 3D lens.

I was allowed to shoot some 3D test footage and I will post a link to this in youtube's 3D format as soon as I have permission.

Disclaimer. I get to play with kit from Panasonic as I know some folks there, they don't pay me to do this or let me keep the gear :(
Also the camera I used was a one off hand built prototype, so things may change (read get better) by the time it hits production.
I regularly use Lumix cameras, but I also use Canon and Sony.

EDIT 31/07/10: A friend of mine (Ian from Superteam films http://www.houseofhellmovie.com/#vid) pointed out that I didn't mention that this new camcorder does not use the anaglyph red/green system that my images on the blog are created with. What you get is full colour 3D like you see at the cinema.

* Not really.
** There is! There is! It's really hard to do.