The boys at Engadget take Panasonic’s HDC-SDT750 for a spin, and finds it a pretty decent consumer-grade 3D experience. If you don’t remember, this is a regular consumer grade camcorder with a special addon lens that takes the usual 1080p sensor and splits it into a side-by-side view, suitable for 3D, reducing the horizontal resolution by half.
We didn’t get to do any free roaming with the camera, but that’s none too thrilling anyway: your preview image is a slightly fuzzy 2D on the built-in LCD. What we did do was watch the camera feed its 3D capture live to a Panny 3D TV (in one of the hilarious outfits provide for us by Panasonic, as pictured above), and while the 3D effect is certainly for-reals and non-janky, the actual image quality takes an obvious hit from the fact that a 1080p sensor is being cut in half to capture the dual images. It almost took us back to the early days of HD cameras, or your friendly neighborhood “HD” webcam, where the output resolution is clearly higher than the sensor is physically capturing.
Personal 3D video cameras will change the mindset of people about their home 3D experience and open a whole world of possibilities for home video enthusiasts!