Panasonic has announced the latest entry into its award-winning Lumix series, the DMC-GF1.

You can always tell when the holiday shopping season is approaching by the number of new point and shoot cameras the companies unleash onto the consumer market.

If you’re looking to start your own production company, or just looking to get a little more serious with your home videos, Panasonic has just announced a new camcorder that may be right up your alley. The Panasonic AG-HMC40 blurs the line between professional camcorders and consumer models, and offers quite the punch for a reasonable $3,200 price tag.

If you weren’t already impressed by Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-G1 Micro Four Thirds camera, then you definitely will be now. Just five months after the initial launch of the camera Panasonic has unveiled a new high-definition version of the camera that allows you to capture HD video in addition to taking pictures.

Panasonic has hit a new depth in gubbins. It has built in ‘Face Recognition’ so the camera can identify who it has just photographed.

Panasonic’s  Lumix DMC-FX48  has a 25mm ultra-wide-angle Leica DC  lens which you can use with an optical — not digital, which has no relevancy — zoom. That’s as if you had picked up a Leica MR and had the same features you would be shooting roughly between 25mm to 125 mm. Cartier Bresson would have married the camera on the spot.

Panasonic’s new waterproof digital camera has been accidentally revealed (or maybe not so accidentally) by a Web site in France. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FT1 can take pictures at a 12 megapixel resolution as well as record 720p high-definition video in the AVCHD format. The camera saves both pictures and video onto AVCHD cards, and can supposedly handle a drop from 5 feet or being submerged in up to three meters of water.

Panasonic’s DMC-G1 is a DSLR which solves apparently two contradictory problems. It is a genuine digital single lens reflex and it is smallish, light and handleable.

Novoflex has announced a new adapter that will make Micro Four Thirds camera much more attractive. The adapter will allow you to put Leica, Zeiss, and other lenses on a Micro Four Thirds cameras, something that was previously not an option.