It’s not quite the fall yet but Hitachi has formally announced the world’s first Blu-ray capable disc camcorders today. The new camcorders are the hybrid DZ-BD7H and the BD single disc DZ-BD70. Both camcorders will begin selling in Japan on August 30th and will become available in the overseas market starting in October.

The Hitachi DZ-BD7H is known as a hybrid camcorder because it has both a 30GB internal hard drive and a BD drive. Customers can record 1920 x 1080 full HD video onto the hard drive and then later copy the contents to the BD drive. If you record at full 1920 x 1080, you’ll get approximately four hours of video from the 30GB HDD. If you record at 1440 x 1080, you’ll get approximately eight hours of video on the drive. The camcorder also comes with a 5.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor capable of providing 2.07 megapixels for video and 4.32 megapixels for digital stills. The DZ-BD7H supports high speed dubbing to the BD drive at rates of 2X recording speed.

The Hitachi DZ-BD70 is a BD single drive camcorder which can record approximately one hour of 1920 x 1080 resolution video onto a single 8cm BD disc. If you switch to 1440 x 1080, you’ll get approximately two hours on a single 8cm BD disc.The DZ-BD70 also features the same 5.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor.

Key features of the new Hitachi BD camcorders include:

• Adaptive Dynamic Noise Reduction which analyzes and encodes the video while reducing noise
• Advanced Correlative Coefficient Multiplication Method which reduces false colors to reproduce images in clearer and more natural colors
• MPEG4 AVC/H.264 codec suppport
• 12 element in 9-group, 18-sided multicoat lens
• HDMI support
• SD memory card slot
• Review recorded videos with a display of 12 thumbnails
• Interactive guide
• 10x optical zoom

You can find additional information about the new Hitachi Blu-ray camcorders here on Hitachi’s website.

[Check it out]

[Check out the press release]

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