Panasonic on Wednesday claimed the capacity lead for HD camcorders in revealing the HS350. Carrying a 240GB hard drive, the camera can capture up to 31 hours, 40 minutes of 1080i widescreen footage in AVCHD (H.264); It can also take SDHC cards to add up to another 32GB of storage or offload video from the camera.

Actual battery life is about 1.5 hours when recording to the hard drive and 5 minutes more when using only SDHC memory.

Image quality has also been given help with a new image stabilization that samples motion more frequently, at 4,000 times per second, and has an "active mode" that can compensate for much more obvious jolts from walking. Lens correction and a full-auto scene mode also try to produce an ideal scene without the user's own intervention.

The HS350 has a 12X optical zoom lens and, like newer camcorders, records 5.1-channel surround sound; it can double as a still camera for 10.6-megapixel shots. Panasonic launches the system in Japan first, shipping it on July 25th for a predicted price of about $1,591; a US release is very likely but hasn't been mentioned. [via Impress]