Name: Hitachi Blue-ray Cam Wooo DZ-BD10H
Category: digital video camera
Price: About JPY160,000
Release date in Japan: August 9, 2008

Blu-ray, which won the format war over rival HD DVD in the next-generation disc wars, continues its victory laps, recently popping up in handheld digicams. The latest entry: Hitachi's Blue-ray Cam Wooo DZ-BD10H.

The Wooo (let's call it that; it's so much more fun than "DZ-whatever") is a lighter, higher-resolution upgrade to the earlier Blu-ray-equipped DZ-BD9H, and marks Hitachi's first cam to save full HD (1920x1080 High Definition) video to Blue-ray discs (BD-R/RE). Its 7-megapixel CMOS sensor records video to MPEG4 AVC/H.264 format, and takes still snaps at 2880×2160 resolution.

The Wooo gives you four ways to save video: the internal 30GB hard drive, an SDHC memory card, 8-cm DVD-RAM/-RW/-R discs, or 8-cm Blu-ray discs, one of which holds about 7.5GB of data. The hard drive or a 32GB SDHC card will each save over 4 hours of full HD video, while a Blu-ray disc will store about an hour. (Video saved to DVD is in non-HD MPEG2 format.) The camera includes a one-touch dubbing feature to transfer recorded video from hard drive or SDHC to a disc, for playback or further editing on a PC.

Other specs: 10x optical zoom, face recognition, optical image stabilization, 2.7-inch LCD display, HDMI connector for output to a PC or TV. About 575g with battery.

More info: http://av.hitachi.co.jp/cam/products_bd/bd10h/index.html (Japanese)

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