Panasonic and Sony Corporation both announced today the commencement of licensing for "AVCHD," the high definition (HD) digital video camera recorder format, as well as expansion of the format's specifications, informs Hardware News.

"Panasonic and Sony announced basic specifications for "AVCHD" on May 11th, and since then have extensively promoted the format throughout the industry while preparing for licensing. Then, the two companies have decided to include memory cards (SD Memory Card and Memory Stick) and hard disk drives as applicable recording media of the format in addition to previously-announced 8cm DVD. This is for the purpose of broadening the range of applicable media, thereby allowing wide variety of products to be developed by various manufacturers. The new specification was defined as "AVCHD" format Version 1.0," said the companies' representatives.

Because the production costs are lower than the Blu-ray technology implies, Sony and Panasonic, two of the main camcorders manufacturers, have developed AVCHD which uses the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression system to "decrease" data's capacity and then store it on a standard DVD disk.

The main bakers of the AVCHD have also extended the compatibility of their format, developing licensing programs for playback appliances and PC software in addition to the one for video cameras. Panasonic and Sony both said that this format is: "the new HD digital video camcorder format best suited for the coming High Definition" era and the following companies have expressed their support for "AVCHD" to date.

It seems that Sony will continue to disregard Toshiba, the most powerful enemy in the Blu-ray - HD DVD war, as the latter publicly announced last week that it intends to back any format which might put a stop to this futile battle that threatens the profits and the stability of the dedicated market.

But, in the same day in which Sony and Panasonic announced that the companies have co-developed a new HD standard which will replace for the moment the already famous Blu-ray, on May 11 to be more specific, the latter, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. (known for its Panasonic brand), stated that it will also develop a similar technology which will be used to record HD (high-definition) content onto SD Memory Cards (solid-state memory).

"Panasonic's efforts to develop the technology to record HD images onto SD Memory Cards and construct a new playback and editing environment, in addition to its establishing the AVCHD standard for 8-cm DVDs, will serve to further stimulate development of products that take advantage of the characteristics of both media," Nakatani added.

As a result, this new HD recording technology, especially created for SD Memory Cards, will have the same features as the AVCHD standard, a very capable encoding procedure which is able to record 1:1080i and 2:720p images in HD format on a 8 cm DVD disc. The combination of both standards enables the manufacturer to produce smaller and more compact camcorders with an increased image and sound high-quality.

More precisely, 1:1080i is an HD standard featuring 1080 scanning lines which are connected between each other, and 2:720p is also an HD standard, although this one is using not a connected scanning, but a progressive one, which features less scanning lines - only 720.


Technical Details

Video Signal 1080/60i
1080/50i
1080/24p 720/60p
720/50p
720/24p 480/60i 576/50i

Pixels (horizontal x vertical) 1920×1080
1440×1080 1280×720 720×480 720×576

Aspect ratio 16:9 16:9 4:3, 16:9 4:3, 16:9

Compression technology MPEG-4 AVC/H.264

Luminance sampling frequency 74.25MHz
55.7MHz 74.25MHz 13.5MHz 13.5MHz

Sampling structure 4:2:0

Quantifying bit number 8 bit (luminance/color contrast)

Audio Compression technology Dolby Digital (AC-3)
Linear PCM Bit rate after compression 64 - 640kbps 1.5Mbps (2 channels)

Audio channels 1-5.1 channels 1-7.1 channels

System MPEG-2 Transport Stream

System bit rate up to 24Mbps