Hitachi Rolls Out the World's First Blu-ray Powered Camcorders, The DZ-BD70/BD7H

The hype around Sony's Blu-ray format has reached new levels lately, partially caused by all the controversy surrounding the conflict between its supporters and their adversaries from the HD DVD camp, but also for other reasons as well. And among all this ruckus, the people over at Hitachi have decided that it's about time to drop a Blu-Bomb and announced the development of the world's first camcorders capable of recording straight to Blu-ray media.

The company rolled out two different models, the DZ-BD70 and its mode advanced "sister", the DZ-BD7H. Thus, the DZ-BD7H is a hybrid cam with a Blu-ray drive and a 30 GB built-in HDD that can record approximately four hours of 1920x1080 full high-definition video, or up to eight hours of 1440x1080 high-definition video. Moreover, it can also copy the contents from the HDD to the 8cm BD within the camcorder so that users do not need to use any external devices.

On the other hand, the DZ-BD70 is a BD single drive camcorder that can record approximately one hour of 1920x1080 full high-definition video (two hours of 1440x1080 HD video) on a 8cm BD.

Both the DZ-BD70 and the DZ-BD7H sport a very innovative, recently developed full high-definition lens, as well as a 5.3-Mpixel progressive CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) image sensor, which can shoot video at 2.7 Mpixels and take still photos at 4.32 Megapixels. As mentioned earlier, they are developed especially for Blu-ray discs, but they also work on normal DVDs (although the storage capacity is seriously diminished in this case).

Both the DZ-BD70 and the DZ-BD7H will be available by the end of August in Japan and will probably arrive in the US and Europe around October. Unfortunately, no pricing details are available for now, but since things are both "world's first", they certainly won't come cheap.

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