hitachi

Hitachi jumped to the front of the Blu-ray camcorder race this morning, announcing two camcorders that can record video at up to 1920x1080-pixel resolution on 8-centimeter Blu-ray discs. Both models, the DZ-BD7H and the DZ-BD70, include 5.3-megapixel CMOS sensors developed by AltaSens of Thousand Oaks, California. When recording video, the camcorders will use up to 2.07 megapixels (or 1920x1080), but will use up to 4.32-megapixels when capturing 4:3 still images. Both models will also sport 10X optical zoom lenses, 2.7-inch LCDs, and will be able to fit about one hour of 1920x1080 footage, or two … Read more

Backing up its long-standing desire to be first out with a Blu-ray DVD camcorder--a spokesman told me more than a year ago that the company planned to be first, and the company had a prototype on display at Ceatac last year (see slide show)--Hitachi issued a press release last Friday with a few specs and a promise for availability this fall.

The skimpy specs include a 5-megapixel 1/2.8-inch 1920x1080 CMOS sensor from Altasens, and that it will compress and record in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 format to 3-inch BD-RE/-R and DVD-RAM/-RW/-R discs. The camcorder … Read more

Based on a post on a Japanese Web site, Gizmodo has decided to put its rumor mill into high gear, speculating that Blu-ray camcorders will be available by the end of the year. Of course, news that Hitachi is working on a Blu-ray camcorder is nothing new. As CNET's News.com reported in October of last year, Hitachi showed mock-ups of some Blu-ray camcorder designs at the Japanese trade show Ceatec. At the time, the company said that it planned to have such a camcorder on the market in one to two years. Kazuto Shimagami, senior manager in the … Read more

Like Tony Blair, the hard drive industry is looking at a third way.

To more densely record data on hard drives, that is. Disk track recording involves storing data in tracks laid down in a precise pattern on a platter, according to an article by Rick Merritt of EE Times. It's similar to patterned media hard drives, but could get to market earlier. Disk track recording could show up in drives in two years or so. Patterned media hard drives may not show up until 2012 or later.

"It's probably not a factor of two better than … Read more

If you've got $399 and a burning need to story 1 terabyte of data, Hitachi has the drive for you.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is now available at retailers like CDW for a suggested retail price of $399. The company announced the drive earlier.

Although hard drive makers compete in a difficult market that often results in losses for many companies, their engineers nonetheless move at a blistering pace. Hard drive capacity continues to double about every two years, which leads to higher capacity at lower prices.

How much is a terabyte? … Read more

Hitachi's main television-related introduction at CES 2007 might engender a certain amount of confusion about an already-confusing topic to many HDTV buyers. The company is marketing its new plasma TV, the P50H401 (February, $2,500), as the world's first "50-inch 1080 HDTV flat panel for under $2,500." If you're paying close attention (and really, who is?), you'll notice "p" is a big deal, however--the panel's pixel array is 1,280x1,080, not the 1,920x1,080 that qualifies for 1080p native resolution. But the price is definitely better than that … Read more

Not all gadgets are the technological equivalent of genetic mutations. Some hybrids actually make sense and don't even look like lab experiments gone awry.

On paper, at least, Hitachi's hybrid camcorder appears to be one of these exceptions. Gizmag says the video camera, which Hitachi calls the first DVD/HDD product of its kind, can easily burn videos directly onto a DVD inside the camcorder, bypassing the need for a computer altogether. It comes in 1.3- and 3.3-megapixel models, each with an 8GB hard drive that can store 110 minutes of video, at about $1,450 … Read more

Remember Yuri Geller? Back in the '70s, he would go on late-night talk shows and claim he could bend silverware with mind power. Ed McMahon fell for it, but not many others.

Now Hitachi has come up with a machine-brain interface that lets people do things with brainpower. The machine is essentially a big optical sensor which detects changes in blood flow in the brain. By studying the flow of blood to different sections of the brain, Hitachi believes it can divine intention. (The blog Pink Tenacle translated the report from Japanese newspapers.).

In experiments, subjects were able to flip … Read more