JVC has finally announced their long awaited tapeless HD camcorder. The JVC GZ-HD7 employs 3 1/5″ CCDs to record a full 1920×1080i picture. This is a full HD image rather than the usual 1440×1080i - then stretched to fit your HDTV - recorded by other consumer camcorders at this point. The JVC GZ-HD7 is also the first consumer camcorder to use a Fujinon lens, which are highly regarded in the broadcast world.
The JVC GZ-HD7 will employ a 60GB hard drive for recording. According to CCInfo, the recording format will be MPEG-2 with a maximum data rate of 30Mbps. Since JVC is not a part of the AVCHD consortium, it was long wondered what compression format would be used. It will be interested to see how this version of MPEG-2 fares against the lower data rate, yet better compression of AVCHD.
The GZ-HD7 should be available in April for an MSRP of $1,799.
