It had to happen eventually: the world's first full high definition hard drive camcorder has just been announced. The Everio HD7 records footage in full high definition (1920 x 1080), making it super-high quality (and therefore ideal for playing back on your HD TV). The camcorder has 3 CCDs, which are 500k pixels a piece, has a 60GB hard drive (which will apparently allow for 5 hours of HD footage) and offers a battery life of around 1-2 hours. There's an optical image stabiliser to help correct camera wobble, a 10x optical zoom lens (the lens is made by Fujinon, in case you're wondering), and an SD card slot. No pricing as yet, but expect it to be fairly pricey. [Katie]
Related: JVC's new Everio G series range | Sophisti wireless entertainment system from JVC | Micro System with iPod playback and 1GB flash memory
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
Check out the best iPhone 4 accessories here ,
This is not a full HD video camera. A full HD camera has one or more recording sensors each with 1920x1080 resolution, and outputs 1080p video without interpolation. Not only does this camera output 1080i video (which is half the resolution of 1080p) but it has to perform interpolation to get even that resolution as its sensors doen't even have the 1920x540 resolution needed for 1080i. So, a lot of marketing hype to pretend its much higher quality than it really is. Expect to many $000s for a proper full HD video camera for at least a couple more years...
Granted this isn't a full hd camera by any means. 1080i is not half the resolution of 1080p. Interlaced and progressive are different aproaches to image production. 1080i is interlaced (50/60 fields per sec) 1080 (24/25/30/50/60etc full frames). A proper 1080i camera should have 1080 lines of verticle resolution which is exactly the same as 1080p. Maybe you are confusing Hdv with Hd. No hdv camera creates full resolution hd and never will do due to limitations of the format.