Digital World Tokyo | Hitachi claims first Blu-ray camcorder coming this year

Hitachi claims first Blu-ray camcorder coming this year

July 20th, 2007

After what seems like years of waiting and fiddling around with AVCHD and the like, it seems the world is finally about to get a real next-gen HD video camera after Hitachi’s late-afternoon Tokyo announcement of the first Blu-ray camcorder.

The company reckons it will have something ready before the end of the year – a prediction that looks believable thanks to demos today of an 8cm Blu-ray recorder, and an LSI chipset that can handle the appropriate 1080p H.264 HD compression.

The mini BD writer is really the key to the new camcorder and can handle 8cm BD-R/RE disks, as well as DVD-RAM/R/RW for the old-skool.

There are no concrete details yet, but anytime between September and the end of December is possible. Pricing – of course – remains a mystery, although early adopters should be braced to suck it up at around ¥250,000 ($2,000) we reckon.