Hitachi has developed several critical technologies to create a camcorder that shoots in 1920x1080 high-definition. The company is expected to announce the new Blu-ray camcorder later this year.
Among the newly developed parts are an optical head for Blu-ray/DVD, an image pickup device, CODEC LSI and image processing LSI. The small sized optical head that allegedly supports Blu-ray disc media is the first of its kind. It carries two lenses that separate the Blu-ray and DVD optical systems with support for BD-RE/-R and standard DVD-RAM/-RW/-R.
The new CMOS image pickup device can output 60 frames of 1920x1080 progressive images a second. The CODEC LSI supports MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 for HDTV images, MPEG-2 for standard-definition images and coding and decoding for JPEG still images. And, it can down-convert MPEG-4 files to MPEG-2 files.
This means you can store HDTV images in the integrated HDD and write standard-definition images onto DVD disc afterwards.
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