Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. has developed an AVCHD digital camcorder able to record HDTV video on SD memory cards.

This camcorder will be released on the market by the end of 2006. This is expected to be the world's first AVCHD camcorder that uses SD memory cards for storage. The camcorder's prototype will be presented at the "CEATEC JAPAN 2006" event to be held at Makuhari Messe from October 3, 2006. For this model, Matsushita developed a "3 CCD camera system for HDTV," which enhances color reproduction using three CCD sensors, and a new image signal processing LSI that supports MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoding. Using a 4 GB SD memory card, the camcorder can record approximately 85 minutes of video at an encoding rate of 6 Mbps or 55 minutes at 9 Mbps. The company said it will continue the development of another model able to record onto 8-cm DVD discs.