In the theater within its booth space, Panasonic hosted its annual press conference this afternoon. Like Sony’s that followed, it was scaled down compared to press conferences of years past, both in terms of venue and product launches. (To be fair, Panasonic announced quite a bit before the show.)

The big product news for Panasonic is the AG-HMC40, a compact handheld AVCCAM model that features three 1/4″ CMOS chips and a built-in 12X zoom in a 2.2lb. chassis. According to the press release, here are the flavors of MPEG-4-based AVCHD that it shoots:

“The HD camcorder records in all four professional AVCCAM recording modes, including the high-quality PH mode (average 21 Mbps/Max 24Mbps), the HA mode (approx.17 Mbps), the HG mode (approx. 13Mbps) and the extended recording HE mode (approx. 6Mbps). It supports 1080/59.94i (in all modes) and 1080/29.97p, 1080/23.98p native, 720/59.94p, 720/29.97p, and 720/23.98p native (in PH mode only).”

Like the HMC150, the initial handheld member of the AVCCAM line, the new HMC40 captures to SDHC cards. At highest quality (PH mode), a 32GB SDHC card (currently starting at about $75 and going up to $275 or so for a speedy Panasonic brand “Class 6″ model) records 3 hours of 1920×1080 video. A stereo XLR input module is optional but not standard; video I/O comprises HDMI, USB2, composite, and component.

One killer feature that will appeal to some multi-tasking video folks: The camera has a still image capture function that snaps 10.6 Megapixel JPEGs directly to the SD card. Other higher-end features: the HMC40 includes cine-like gamma and dynamic range stretch. It actually seems very close in feature set to the HMC150, but with smaller imagers and XLRs as an option — interval recording and pre-recording are there, as is the waveform monitor, dynamic range stretch, and focus assist.

The HMC40 will be available in August for $3,195 MSRP.