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I found this very interesting new 720p SD-memory based camcorder today.

More info: http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=93488
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=95227
http://forums.steves-digicams.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=569962

Here are some native 720p .mov video samples taken with this camera: 1 (38mb), 2 (246mb), 3 (12mb), 4 (9mb), 5 (14mb) - If I’d have the camcorder to test, I’d film some people, do some handheld interviews outdoors instead of just filming cows, ducks, buildings and trees like in these samples.

What I find about this camcorder to be superior than Sony and Panasonic’s expensive AVCHD offerings, as well as interesting compared to Canons and Sanyo’s HD camcorders:

- It records 720p which I find to be better than 1080i, I haven’t seen any Sony, Panasonic, Canon camcorders be able to do 720p

- It records to about 4mbit/s, yes I find this low bitrate very convenient, in theory h264 720p should not use more than 4mbit/s for full quality, that depends only on the performance of the h264 encoding chip, the encoding chip of this one might not be the best but the bitrate is the one I’m targeting for, especially since I would like to be able to upload my HD videos on the Internet directly without conversion. This bitrate also provides 1 hour per 2 GB of the SD card capacity.

- It records to the .mov container using H264, and I don’t know which audio codec, hopefully it is not ADPCM but AAC. I would currently prefer a camcorder like this one to record directly to 720p DivX with Mp3 audioin the .avi container, since that is what I use on my video-blogs, and I think that the .avi container is more compatible with people’s current PC/Mac/Linux setups as well as DivX 720p playback requires less processing power to playback smoothly. H264 only improves quality about 5-10% over DivX at 720p according to some sources I have heard, so I don’t think that h264 really is absolutely needed. Hopefully that current Blueray, HDDVD, PS3 and other devices can support DivX 720p in the .avi container natively, so this isn’t about having a container standard monopoly.

- Price, 249$ is very disrupting I think for a HD camcorder price, even based on SD memory, which you can buy a 8GB capacity for 70$, have a couple of these and transport a portable multimedia player on the move with up to 160GB if you need to empty on of your SD cards with up to 4 houres of footage on 8GB SD while filming with your other SD card.

What seems to be unperfect about this product according to the samples I have seen on the above links:

- There seems to be somekind of Shutter, frame-rate, image stabilization kind of problem, since pans and handheld shots look quite bad.

- Auto-focus seems to be slow

- Zoom is noisy

Anyways, I will try to soon test this camcorder, especially post some shots of people and not only cows, ducks and dogs as the available samples currently are about. I think that this Aiptek Z300HD is very promizing of the upcomming lots of 720p HD camcorders that are gonna be available. This must mean that now there is a cheap DSP solution to use in SD, HDD and other camcorder solutions. So what I hope to see in the next few months, is one cheap camcorder like this with a slight better optics concerning image stabillization shutter smoothness of video framrate or whatever is wrong with this one concerning image quality, and I hope also to very soon see a DivX HD compliant camcorder, 720p 4mbit/s with 160kbit/s Mp3 stereo sound I think would be the greatest. And also I hope that camcorder manufacturers are thinking of adding Wi-Fi, usb-host to plug-in an external hard disc that takes the power from the usb-host connection, also a usb-host that works with an external keyboard, so that one can edit filenames, description and titles when uploading with the camcorder directly onto FTP servers and a 1-click solution to update ones HD video-blog. If a Wi-Fi solution can work to also synch with other camcorders through a portable editor to do a multi camera production and to also stream live the 4mbit/s stream by uploading that through Wi-Fi, thus being able to broadcast 4mbit/s video live.

Also, I hope that this DSP chip is great at encoding at this 4mbit/s using very intelligent variable bitrate algorithm, automatically detecting the action and adjusting more or less bitrate in realtime while recording.