Panasonic HC-X1000 4K camcorder gets small for the ENG crowd
Panasonic's answer to Sony's FDR-AX1 is quite a bit smaller and lighter.
Lori Grunin
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Small and light
Panasonic takes on the Sony FDR-AX1 with a camcorder that's slightly shorter and about two-thirds the weight.
Microphone
The onboard microphone is similar to that of Panasonic's higher-end ENG camcorders.
Filter-friendly
The lens has a bayonet mount for add-ons.
Hooded
In its typical configuration, with the lens hood attached.
Top controls
Touchscreen
The camcorder has a reasonably responsive touchscreen, though you can only use it for navigating the menus, which is a bit disappointing.
Display
The LCD is pretty typical for this class of camcorder.
Compact
You can see how short this camcorder is.
Control details
The camcorder has a fairly robust manual feature set, though it might be hard to differentiate some of these buttons by feel. Under the central cover sit two SD card slots; Panasonic recommends a U-30 card for shooting 4K.
Three-ring circus
The three rings on the lens control zoom, focus, and iris, and are easy to differentiate by feel. Panasonic managed to compact the 20x zoom by using four lens groups that are independently moved by a single driver.
Connections
The camcorder supports USB 3.0 and clean HDMI out, but it may require a firmware upgrade to finalized HDMI 2.0 for 2160/60p output.
XLR
Though it has two XLR inputs, because of the size of the camcorder Panasonic had to split them up.