Tokyo Friendfinder
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.
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01:13 AM 
Mark Hiratsuka •
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Home theater | Video 
Tagged with:
blu-ray
camcorders
hd tv
hitachi
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