Hitachi Showcases Blu-ray Camcorder for First Time
An industry first, Hitachi has announced a hand-held HD camcorder which records MPEG-4/H.264 directly to a Blu-ray Disc. (It also supports MPEG-2/Motion JPEG for standard definition recording.) The camera will be released in Japan this Autumn as part of Hitachi’s Wooo line-up. If you haven’t heard of Wooo, don’t worry because I haven’t either. Pricing has not been announced.
The Wooo camera records 1080p video, via its 5.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, onto the 7.8GB 8cm Blu-ray disc, not the 12cm BD that holds 25GB per layer. Judging by the disc capacity, it look like a single 8cm BD will hold just under 2 hours of HD video – which should be enough for the casual home movie maker. Somehow I don’t see a lot of people lining up to record their daughter’s birthday party in pristine 1080p.
This will be the first 8cm BD drive available, and it will support BD-RE/R and DVD-RAM/RW/R playback. Hitachi boasts silent operation due to implementing Partial-Constant Angular Velocity.
While this is an intriguing concept, and a first for the Blu-ray Disc format, I’m not sure optical media is going to be the preferred medium for camcorders in the future. This next decade will find most people will drop their movie files on their computer and edit them before burning it to a DVD, so an HDD based HD camcorder seems more practical.
Still, kudos to Hitachi for being the first to offer this solution.
Originally reported by Impress (Japanese)
I agree that a HiDef camcorder that records to a hard disk drive or a solid state drive will probably be more attractive. Interesting product though!