Panasonic HC-X1000 4K camcorder gets small for the ENG crowd

Panasonic takes on the Sony FDR-AX1 with a camcorder that's slightly shorter and about two-thirds the weight.

The onboard microphone is similar to that of Panasonic's higher-end ENG camcorders.

The lens has a bayonet mount for add-ons.

In its typical configuration, with the lens hood attached.

The camcorder has a reasonably responsive touchscreen, though you can only use it for navigating the menus, which is a bit disappointing.

The LCD is pretty typical for this class of camcorder.

You can see how short this camcorder is.

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.

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.

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.

Though it has two XLR inputs, because of the size of the camcorder Panasonic had to split them up.