As the pioneer of the tiny all-in-one camcorders with their D-Snap series of devices using SD cards as memory, Panasonic continues to evolve the platform with a new model which puts the emphasis on video quality.
The new Panasonic SDR-S100 is touted as the world's first three-CCD camcorder that uses an SD card as its memory media.
This means that it will offer higher quality images since it has three chips recording the different colours of a scene, instead of a single chip like other small form factor camcorders such as the Sanyo Xacti.
The SDR-S100 will also record video in widescreen mode (16:9), which should make it useful for producing video that is played back on many of the plasma or LCD TVs on the market today.
Other features include a 10x optical zoom, Panasonic's Optical Image Stabilization technology and a new MPEG2 engine to boost its processing performance to support higher quality recordings.
On the whole, the SDR-S100 is pretty impressive, offering a package similar to most mid-range digital cameras and weighing only 242 grams. And, despite its size, it still has a huge 70mm LCD display.
With the SDR-S100, Panasonic is obviously targeting those who want to take their camcorder everywhere they go, but the company does make a compromise with the use of SD cards.