14 DAY TRIAL // Following the CES coverage trend, I'm proud to present the first consumer camera that integrates both an HD sensor and an internal hard drive used for storage. I'm pretty fond of hard disk cameras, mainly because the internal storage space is pretty big. Depending on the hard drive, older SD cameras could record between 3 and 5 hours of video on a single unit. Of course, in order to record such a high amount of time you needed additional batteries, but the idea remained pretty appealing compared to miniDVs which could record 60-90 minutes on a cassette.
JVC is the first to introduce the hard drive to the HD era with this new baby because they've announced a high-definition version of the Everio hard drive camcorder series. The GZ-HD7 records video in 1080i (1920x1080 interlaced) resolution directly on the 60 GB hard drive. About 5 hours of HD content can be stored onto the disk (at a medium bitrate of 30 Mb/s). The new Everio camcorder is slightly bigger than its SD brothers and integrates three CCD sensors and the well known Fujinon lens.
The device has optical image stabilization, a 10x optical zoom (a 20-30x optical zoom would have been better) and comes with bundled editing and archiving software. As an option, you can buy a DVD burner called "HD Everio Share Station" on which you can burn your home videos on DVDs. The camcorder comes with integrated USB, HDMI, and i.Link (Firewire). Pricing and availability are unknown at the moment, but don't expect such a product to have a price tag lower than $1500 (and that's pretty optimistic).