Toshiba announced their gigashot A and K video camcorders. The gigashot A100F features a 1.8-inch shock-resistant 100GB disk with 1/3-inch CMOS sensor. It features full HD video (1,920 x 1,080 or 1080i) recordings at 60fps with 16bit/48kHz Dolby digital stereo audio.It uses high-quality MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video and will give you about 12 hours of video recording at the highest quality setting and around 23 hours in standard mode. You can also take 2 megapixel still photos.
Both the gigashot A and K series feature SDHC expansion, 3-inch LCD, 10x optical zoom, HDMI mini and component out, and USB for PC connectivity.
Toshiba brags that its 78.1 x 135.4 x 79.0-mm measurements make it the world's smallest "Full HD" camcorder with a built-in hard disk drive. The lower-end gigashot K series does slightly lower video resolution - 1280x720 or 720p video and 0.92 megapixel photos in its slightly smaller 80GB or much smaller 40GB hard disk options.
The top of the line gigashot A100F ships in mid November for ¥188,000 (about $1,632). The smaller HDD version, the gigashot A40F comes with a 40GB HDD and you can buy one for ¥158,000 (about $1372). For the K-series, the gigashot K80H will run ya 128,000 yen (about $1111) and the lowest end model, the gigashot K40H (40GB) will cost you ¥108,000 (about $938).
The new gigashot camcorders start shipping in late October. Whether these camcorders will make it to the U.S. in time for the Christmas buying season is another story and with the dollar tanking, these Japanese imported camcorders will only go up in price.
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1920x1080 at 60fps is 1080p, which seems highly unlikely. Are they talking about fields rather than frames?
I guess I probably have to wait a year or so for the price to go down
Probably won't be able to afford it
I have one of these, it was lent to me from Toshiba for a shoot. It is 100% NON-Mac compatible, and that makes it totally useless to me. I have tried MPEG streamclip, and QT Pro Mpeg , but nothing will let me access these files... not even VLC can read them. Totally crappy camera, who cares if it takes nice pictures if I can't get to them after?