Passively watching HD content is for the dinosaurs. The *really* cool people film their own HD content, and judging by recent releases, such recording is inching closer to the mainstream. Canon’s the latest company to get involved and its iVIS HG10 one-ups Panasonic’s efforts by having a built-in hard drive, 40GB to be exact. (With Panasonic’s jawn you have to carry SD cards with you.) This camcorder records up to a resolution of 1440×1080. You can expect to record around five hours of video that high in quality.
Product Page [Canon Japan via Akihabara News]
The resolution is actually 1920×1080, and the USA product page is easier to read (if you don’t know Japanese):
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ProductCatIndexAct&fcategoryid=173
Looks like an October 2007 release date. Awesome to see support for 24p Cinema Mode. They claim between 5.5 to 15 hours of video. At 1920×1080, the “HDD Photo Grab” from video feature is pretty sweet as well. Why didn’t the first movers think of this? Nice to see you can transfer video by USB. My current camera has the connection, but only uses it for photos. Lame. Are there many tools that support AVCHD format yet? Last I heard Apple wasn’t in on the format for their tools???
I highly reccomend a canon wide angle lense (Canon WD-H43 0.7x Wide Angle Converter for HV20 & HV30 Camcorders). This allows you to get much closer to the subject.
For absolutely super quality sound with ANY mic you must get really close! Just think of those boom mic guys who hold the mic right inches over the actors heads.
All in all, I’ve been very impressed with this camera.