The next step in the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray formats has now come to pass – Hitachi officially unveiled two versions of the world’s first Blu-ray camcorder earlier in the day, prompting raised eyebrows and calendar-clearing by gadget hounds everywhere. We first heard about Hitachi’s new Blu-ray camcorders early last week, but today's presentation shows a legitimate reason for the excitement. The DZ-BD7H and DZ-BD70 models record High-Definition video at 1920x1080-pixel resolution onto a Blu-ray disk (BD-R/-RE discs of single side/single layer), and include a 10X zoom lens with a 2.7” LCD screen. The new camcorders will start selling in Japan by the end of this month and will come to the U.S. by mid-October. That’s plenty of time before the busy Christmas season.
The DZ-BD7H camcorder will be a hybrid, with a 30 gig internal hard drive that will be able to record about four hours of 1920x1080 full high-definition video, and about eight hours of 1440x1080 HD. And the no-brainer extra on this one is that you’ll be able to copy video from the HDD to the 8cm Blu-ray disc internally, avoiding any hassles with extra cords or drives.
The DZ-BD70 will include a single drive camcorder to record one hour at
1920x1080 HD video and 1440x1080 HD video for two hours. Both will have a 5.3 megapixel progressive CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide
Semiconductor) image sensor at 2.07 mega pixels for video and 4.32 mega pixels for still photos. And the capacity difference is noticeably ridiculous: the Blu-ray has 5 times the capacity of a regular DVD, which already had a pretty good capacity. Now I just need to get my HD
flat screen in order so I can start making my own Blu-ray dramatic chipmunk videos.
The official videos of the Blu-ray camcorders from Hitachi are right here.
