SV-AV10 Audio/Video Recorder: The Whole World In Your Hands

While not yet meeting the needs of most quality-sensitive picture takers and movie makers, Panasonic's SV-AV10 clears the way for a product category that combines a camcorder, digital still camera, audio player, voice recorder and movie viewer in a versatile, pocketable package.

Housed in a diminutive, 8.5 x 5 x 2.5-cm folding case (red, silver or blue), the SV-AV10 delivers VGA (0.33-megapixel) still-image capture, QVGA (0.11-Mpixel) video recording, a voice recorder function and MP3/AAC playback, all based on a plug-in Secure Digital (SD) memory card.

As with the Archos Multimedia Jukebox and Apple iPod, the emerging theme is portable capture, playback and archive products for both audio and images. But the SV-AV10 highlights the growing competition between solid-state and hard-disk memory technologies in otherwise similar "capture/play" boxes. The SV-AV10 ships with an 8-Mbyte memory card, providing 2 minutes of video, 45 "fine mode" still pictures or 25 minutes of voice recording-clearly not enough. So, up to a 512-Mbyte SD memory card can be used with the SV-AV10 for corresponding increases in storage capacity.

The downside is that sizable storage comes at a sizable price: SD cards are still priced north of 50 cents/Mbyte. The biggest challenge for the diskless-data-vault gadget maker remains the achievement of both affordability and meaningful capacity.

Four primary assemblies are used in the SV-AV10, with the main component-laden assembly shown at right. Power for the SV-AV10 is supplied by a 900 mA-hr lithium-ion battery, and a 40 x 30-mm (2-inch diagonal) thin-film transistor color display is the lone viewfinder for the camera.

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Our cost-of-goods-sold estimate places the manufacturing cost for the SV-AV10 between $100 and $150.

DAVID CAREY IS PRESIDENT OF PORTELLIGENT (WWW.TEARDOWN.COM; AUSTIN, TEXAS), WHICH PRODUCES TEARDOWN REPORTS AND RELATED INDUSTRY RESEARCH ON WIRELESS, MOBILE AND PERSONAL ELECTRONICS.