Japanese consumer electronics giant Hitachi, has introduced dubbed the BD70E and BD7HE – two new digital video camcorders based on the Blu-ray Disc. These camcorders can record directly to the discs, allowing instant playback in any compatible player.
Roland Fritsch, Product Marketing Manager of Hitachi Digital Media Group, commented “Even if you don’t have the capability to view Full HD 1920×1080 on your TV at the moment, by capturing and saving your high definition footage to Blu-ray disc onboard the camera itself, you can rest assured that your memories are stored in the highest possible resolution – for viewing in the future if you decide to upgrade your equipment.”
Both the Blu-ray camcorders features 5.3-megapixel CMOS sensors, stores 1920×1080 Full HD video on 8cm Blu-ray disc media, have the ability to output to display devices via HDMI port. They make use of 8cm mini Blu-ray discs or 8cm DVD-RAM, RW, R and +RW media making them compatible with Blu-ray disc and the less expensive 8cm DVD formats.
Hitachi BD70E sports Blu-ray disc and Multiformat plus DVD burner drive; whereas the BD7HE provides a Hybrid Blu-ray disc plus hard disk drive camcorder with a 30GB hard disk drive as well as an 8cm Blu-ray disc and Multiformat plus DVD burner drive.
The BD7HE uses the company’s MPEG 4 AVC/H.264 compression to copy Full HD files to Blu-ray disc at a rapid rate. This Hybrid Blu-ray disc + HDD technology enables to create multiple copies of Full HD Blu-ray discs.
You can also set the cameras in standard quality mode while recording, delivering up to 2 hours of recording time on the BD70E and 8 hours on the BD7HE’s integrated hard disk drive.
Both the latest camcorders can also utilize compact 8cm 7.5GB Blu-ray discs, in either recordable (BD-R) or re-writable (BD-RE) formats.
The Hitachi BD70E and BD7HE Blu-ray based camcorders will be available in Europe from October from leading digital media manufacturers such as Maxell.
