Hitachi introduces world’s first Blu-ray camcorders – the DZ-BD7H and DZ-BD70

Hitachi has announced a major Blu-ray related press release. The company has introduced the world’s first Blu-ray Disc Camcorders today in the form of 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.

Let’s quickly go over the major features of the new Hitachi DZ-BD7H. Hitachi calls it a hybrid camcorder which basically means the device 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.