Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Samsung Packs 64GB SSD into Sleek Cylindrical Camcorder





LAS VEGAS -- Along with new stills cams, Samsung today announced a slew of new camcorders at CES 2009. The pick of the bunch is easily the HMX-H106 (trust me, when you're covering a press conference, these names start to get very confusing).The thing that readers will first notice is that the camera contains 2001's HAL, clearly visible by his glowing red eye inside the lens.


And it's a decent lens to, coming from Schneider Kreuznach.But good looks and sharp optics aren't (quite) enough to earn a place on Gadget Lab. So what's the gimmick? A huge, 64GB solid state drive (SSD), that's what. 64GB is enough to hold 12 hours of HD video, and the lack of a spinning platter means the drive only burns 1/8th the juice of a hard drive.Still, the battery won't let you do that. You'll get three hours of recording at 1080p, which is encoded into h.264, saving even more drive space.

Wait. There's more! Samsung has come up with a new touch screen user interface which will eventually be mirrored across devices. So, the UI you see today on the HMX-H106 will tomorrow be seen on TVs and stills cameras (with tweaks of course). In the camera incarnation, it means that you can simply touch to start and stop recording. Nice!No prices yet, but as Samsung makes the memory that goes in there, it should at least be affordable.


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