It's a good time to be a home movie-loving home theater buff, since more and more high-def consumer camcorders are coming out every year. This CES has seen several new models from Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic, most of which are smaller, cheaper, or pack much more memory than the year before. MiniDV tapes might be a thing of the past for consumer HD camcorders; out of the dozen-or-so new models announced by the three companies, none of them use tape. Instead, these camcorders all use hard drive, removable flash memory, or built-in solid-state drives to hold their footage.
Samsung unveiled the HMX-H100, H104, H105, and H106 camcorders, svelte video cameras that rely solely on flash memory. The HMX-H100 records to SD and SDHC cards, and its bigger brothers feature SSD drives.The H104, H105, and H106 (pictured) pack 16-, 32-, and 64-gig flash memory drives respectively, letting users record up to 12 hours (with the H106) of HD footage at the camcorder's highest setting. They all have SDHC card slots, if you need just a little bit more recording time. All four models feature 2.2MP sensors and Schneider Kruznach lenses. The H100, H104, and H105 camcorders ship in March, and the H106 will be available in April. Samsung hasn't yet announced pricing for them.
Sony announced four new HD camcorders, all of which sport hefty hard drives for plenty of recording time. The Handycam HDR-XR100 features a 10x Carl Zeiss zoom lens with optical image stabilization and an 80GB hard drive that can record up to 30 hours of HD footage in LP mode. It also features face-detecting autofocus and Smile Shutter, a feature usually found on Sony's Cyber-shot digital cameras that lets the camcorder automatically take a still photo when a subject is smiling. Its step-up model, the HDR-XR200, features a 120GB hard drive, a 15x Carl Zeiss optical zoom, and a built-in GPS receiver for geotagging and navigation.
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