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Taiwaneese cheap camcorder manufacturer Aiptek might actually become the first to provide a 1080p HD camcorder at consumer friendly prices of around $200-300. Today as far as I know, the cheapest 1080p camcorder costs tens of thousands of dollars at semi-profetionnal levels. Sony and Panasonic have always only provided interlaced HD camcorders so far.

So it seems to have no mic input, at least it’s not mentioned, too bad for that.

Hopefully they improved sound quality at least a minimum so one can stand listening to interviews and conversations recorded with it and not think this was filmed with a lame mobile phone type audio-recorder.

I’d like to know the bitrates. I guess 720p stays around 4mbit/s and 1080p becomes around 8mbit/s perhaps. That would be just very COOL. Much more usable bitrates considering the storage space used on SDHC cards and the possibillity of uploading the HD videos directly to the Internet. At least I think those bitrates are much more usable than Canon’s 17mbit/s for 1080p, Sony and Panasonic’s 15mbit/s for interlaced recordings or Sanyo’s 9mbit/s 720p content or 12mbit/s 1080 interlaced content.

Actually 1440×1080 progressive 30fps would be very awesome. I guess the pixels would be recorded in non-square fashion to provide 16/9 aspect ratio. Sony and Panasonic has been providing 1440×1080 resolution interlaced video for all of their HD camcorders for the past 2 years. It’s only just recently with the latest models that Sony and Panasonic started to do 1920×1080, but still they provide ONLY interlaced video recording so far. The first camcorder to provide 1080p recording at consumer friendly prices MIGHT actually be Aiptek as far as I know.

Canon just announced a nice looking 1920×1080 30fps progressive camcorder the Vixia HF10 but it won’t be out till March or April. Samsung seems to have announced a 1080p camcorder also the HXM20 but it seems not to be immediately available. Sony and Panasonic so far are NOT providing 1080p camcorders at consumer friendly prices as far as I know. Sony and Panasonic want to force semi-profetionnal users into buying their $5000 HD camcorders if they want to get 1080p recording. Which is the only format usable for editing, for computer screens, for HDTVs, for the Internet, for encoding to other formats and more. So thanks Aiptek for bringing $200 1080p camcorders, even though its not square 1920×1080 pixels.

I’m just hoping the sound quality has become more usable for interviews and that some of the rolling shutter has been fixed. If that’s the case, then the AHD300 will be mine, and then I think Aiptek has a shot at completely disrupting the whole HD camcorder market and taking all the big companies by surprise. Then I think Aiptek could become one of the number 1 most popular HD camcorders. Though if sound quality remains unusable and rolling shutter still makes the video look like it was taken using a cell phone, then people will still choose to pay more for Sanyo, Samsung, Toshiba, Sony and Panasonic.

The only coverage so far of these new Aiptek camcorders was posted at http://www.krunker.com/2008/01/13/aiptek-shows-off-new-hd-digital-camcorders-at-ces-2008/ and a discussion is going on about those new Aiptek HD camcorders at http://forums.steves-digicams.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=584700&forum_id=92