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THREEE DEEE. Sorry, just had to get that out of our system. We just played with Panasonic's HDC-SDT750 THREEE DEEE, er, 3D camcorder, and it certainly works as billed. The lens is designed for close-up depth perception in the 3 to 15 foot range, and doesn't have any zoom capability. Luckily, it isn't too hard to pop the screw-on lens off, giving yourself a regular zoomtastic 2D camcorder. When you do pop the 3D lens back on there's a quick set of setup menus, which let you adjust the dual le... nses within the 3D add-on with a few knobs hidden under a door on top of the assembly.

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. Similarly, we doubt the early adoption of cameras like this is going to be dramatic at first, and even after the tech is perfect we're unsure how big of a consumer need there is for something like this, but with easy options like Panasonic's own Micro Four Thirds 3D lens, the barriers to adoption are quickly disappearing. Er, we merely mean to say, THREEE DEEE.

Panasonic HDC-SDT750 3D camcorder preview originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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