This morning Panasonic had a press conference at the US Tennis Association’s Arthur Ashe Stadium where the USTA Open is going on. CBS Sports, in association with DirecTV and Panasonic will be transmitting parts of the Open in 3D both this weekend (September 5 - 6) and the final weekend of the tournament (September 10 - 12). 3D coverage will be carried on one of the DirecTV dedicated 3D channels, n3D. In addition to Panasonic people at the press conference, Gordon Smith, Executive director of the USTA; Stephen Roberts, Senior VP of DirecTV; and Ken Aagaard, Executive VP of Engineering, Operations and Production at CBS Sports all spoke. Amy Adonis, Manager of the Best Buy store at Union Square in Manhattan, was there too, but did not speak.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

The thrust of the press conference was a discussion of Panasonic’s line of full HD products from cameras through consumer displays. In fact, they had an exhibition room open to the public at the USTA Open in order to demonstrate their products to any and all comers. In particular, Panasonic introduced its new 3D home theater systems and discussed their new 3D Innovation Center.

One of the most interesting things Panasonic showed was their 3D consumer camcorder, the HDC-SDT750. While this had been announced on July 27th, it had not been commonly shown before. In fact, one of the Panasonic people I talked to said she had never seen one before labeled in English. This unit is expected to be available later this month at a price of $1400.

The unit is actually a 2-piece system. With the 3D lens removed, the camera is a high-end Full-HD (i.e. 1920 x 1080i) 2D consumer camcorder. With the 3D lens installed, the camcorder generates side-by-side 3D images, each image 950 x 1080. Metadata is stored with the image saying this image was in 3D so when the SD card is inserted into a Panasonic 3D TV system, the images are automatically shown in 3D. Using the TV menu, you can also view the image in 2D, albeit with ½ the normal horizontal resolution, or in the native side-by-side format.

The 3D adaptor lens has a fixed interpupillary distance of about 1" (25mm) and a fixed convergence at about 6′ (2M). If you want to take close up pictures of your children or a family group at Christmas, these settings seem to be about right. If you want to take pictures of things further away than about 20 - 30′ (6 - 9M), I would recommend taking the 3D lens off and shooting in 2D.

In the Panasonic Exhibition Room, they were showing three types of content shot with this camera. First, they had gone to various New York City parks and loaned the camera to people to shoot footage. This footage included a lot of out-of-screen effects such as children on swings kicking their feet up at the camera or blowing bubbles at the camera - content a parent could love, which I guess is Panasonic’s hope. The second type of footage was shot yesterday (8/31) here at the USTA center showing not tennis but footage of the public areas. People walking around, buying souvenirs, going into the stadiums, etc. This footage actually came out pretty good, with fewer out-of-screen effects.

The third type of footage shown was live footage. They had a camera mounted just under a big Panasonic display, with a dummy tennis net mounted so it showed up just at the plane of the screen. Behind you was a photograph of the Arthur Ashe Stadium. Actually two photographs: one of the crowd in the distance mounted on the wall and the other a cut-out of tennis fans in the front rows set perhaps 6" from the wall to give a 3D effect. They gave you a tennis racquet and encouraged you to reach over the net with your racquet to produce more out-of-screen effects. After you played for a while, they handed you a trophy. Again they thrust it over the net so you could also reach over the net toward the 3D image of the trophy. While professional stereographers have learned to limit out-of-screen effects, obviously no one told the Panasonic HDC-SDT750 marketing group the disturbing issues with too much out-of-screen.