Hitachi plans to release this fall the world's first Blu-Ray camcorder featuring a disc drive that allows for the recording of up to one hour of full high-definition video.

The camcorder is equipped with a new 8cm Blu-ray Disc drive is about the same size as drives in conventional DVD camcorders, making a compact design possible. The drive supports reading and writing on 8cm BD-RE/R and DVD-RAM/RW/R media. An 8cm BD-R/RE disc will be able to hold approximately 7GB of video. Hitachi-Maxell is expected to release the first 8cm BD-R media later this year.

The device also uses an A/V codec LSI capable of compressing MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 HD video, while it also supports JPEG still images. The LSI allows the camcorder to handle up to 2.07 million pixels. The camcorder also have a CMOS capable of handling 5.3 million pixels, offering the camera the ability to take still picures of a full high-definition TV (1920?1080p/60Hz).