the panasonic ag-3da1 3d camera

so craig and i (along with rob from macnrg) were at the panasonic intensive at the entertainment technology expo last week and had an up close and personal look at the new 3d camera from panasonic: the ag-3da1. let me say, it’s a pretty impressive looking camera. this is the first digicam of it’s kind incorporating a dual lens system in a single housing. at $21,000 it’s not cheap, but then again it’s not that expensive either - if you’re starting from scratch. panasonic of course recommends you get it with their bt-3dl2550 monitor, which will add another 10k to your receipt.

the ag-3da1 in action at the entertainment technology expo

of course the one major benefit of having two lenses in a single housing - as opposed to two cameras mounted on a 3d rig - is that it inherently removes certain factors for error. since the two lenses function as one there is no need to check separately for 1) vertical deviation, 2) angle deviation, 3) difference in brightness and color, and 4) rotation. the two integrated optical systems of the ag-3da1 eliminate the need for those manual adjustments, because they’re performed entirely inside the camera recorder.

the camera has two 1/4 inch sensors (the rep said that had they gone with bigger ones the price would have been dramatically higher) and the codec in use is the mpg-4 avc/h2.64 - which works great with apple. in the side by side visual test they showed comparing to the mpeg-2 hdv codec, the winner was clearly the avch, but i’d love to try that myself too. i know we’ve seen artifacts with the hdv even shooting with larger ccd’s.

the ag-3da1 in action at the entertainment technology expo

in our little 15 minute test, we found the camera to be very easy to use. basically the major things we had to worry about was parallax, convergence and divergence - along with composition, focus and exposure of course - but between the camera and monitor/glasses station that panasonic had set up, it seemed pretty painless. now if we only had a spare $32,000 somewhere…