Sinclair Broadcast Group has made a large-scale purchase of Panasonic's AG-HPX370 P2 HD shoulder-mount camcorders to outfit all news photographers at its 12 markets producing local news, the company announced at the 2011 NAB Show in Las Vegas.
Sinclair also recently purchased AG-HPX170 P2 HD handhelds for use in the field by its video journalists and multimedia journalists, AJ-HPM200 P2 mobile recorder/players, and AK-HC1500G multipurpose 2/3in 3-CCD HD cameras, which serve as studio cameras on news sets, teaming with Ross Overdrive automated production control systems and Telemetrics' pan/tilt/zoom systems.
Sinclair Broadcast Group owns and operates, programs or provides sales services to 58 television stations in 35 markets. Sinclair's television group is affiliated with all major networks and reaches about 22 percent of all U.S. television households. The Sinclair markets with local ENG operations are: WLOS/WMYA (Asheville, NC), WBFF (Baltimore, MD), KGAN (Cedar Rapids, MI), WICD/WICS (Champaign/Springfield, IL), WCHS/WVAH (Charleston, WV), WSYX/WTTE (Columbus, OH), WKEF/WRGT (Dayton, OH), WZTV (Nashville, TN), KOKH (Oklahoma City, OK), WEAR (Pensacola, FL), WGME (Portland, ME), and KABB (San Antonio, TX).
"Our ongoing objective has been to move to a tapeless IT infrastructure for newsgathering, and for the past several years we've made incremental investments in Panasonic P2 equipment to advance that goal," said Del Parks, Sinclair's VP of Operations and Engineering.
"This broad purchase of HPX370s now allows us to entirely replace our aging, tape-based ENG cameras with a modern format and enables us to shoot HD in the field," he said.
Parks said that by the end of this year more than half of Sinclair's news-producing stations would be fully HD-ready. HPX370s will also be assigned as production cameras in their HD-equipped master control stations.
