Last year’s high-end Panasonic cameras were voted the best high-end camcorders of 2010 by several magazines. It’s great that these 2011 ‘900 series’ camcorders refine things further.

These Panasonic cameras are the only ‘consumer’ cameras on the market with 3 image sensors (Panasonic calls ‘3MOS’). A seperate sensor for each colour: Red Green and Blue. The $100,000 broadcast cameras that the TV stations use all have 3 image sensors like this. However, the consumer camcorders of all other brands still only have one image sensor (combined RGB), which is not as clear.

The other manufacturers with single chip camcorders must be either cutting costs or trying to keep their camcorders small. But the SD900 is still a small camera, so Panasonic did pretty well to fit the 3-colour optics into a small unit.

I’m a graphic artist, so I’m exited about the 50p recording (that means 50 frames per second, progressive format), which is better than the 50i (interlaced) of other cameras (interlacing tries to squeeze 2 exposures into one image). Progressive ‘p’ video looks great on TVs and computers, whereas ‘i’ (interlaced) video only looks good on TVs, but not computers. Because of this, I think that progressive video will become dominant in the future. 50p is excellent.

I would have liked to have seen a 25p mode (25 progressive frames per second), but I can easily convert 50p to 25p on my computer, so its no big deal. Also, Mac software would have been nice, but I can use it on my Mac after converting it to Apple ProRes format, which can then be edited and transferred to Blu-Ray disc.

However, despite my wishes, the 900 series are still by far the best consumer camcorders on the market today, so I will be buying one as soon as it is available in the stores.