Hitachi announced a DVD camcorder at CES. However, I wouldn't get my hopes up. Consider: Hitachi, along with RCA and ProScan, market an $8000 16:9 61" HDTV which includes a built in HDTV tuner. However, it has NO component inputs. Add to this, this HDTV was a year later getting to market than first announced, and still they had not fixed the problem of no component inputs. Forget about watching progressive scan DVD on this HDTV, you can't even watch a normal DVD through component inputs. Considering component inputs can be found on many TV's in the $700 range, this is inexcusable. Also, Hitachi and Toshiba were recently found by a consumer electronics manufacturers marketing asscociation to be selling HDTV's that weren't really HDTV's. The problem? On standard 4:3 sets, the 16:9 portion of the image only contains a large fraction of the number of pixels needed to view true HDTV. The others are included in the black bars above and below the image. A few 4:3 HDTV's, such as the Sony XBR300 line, "collapse" all the pixels into the 16:9 image, leaving the black bars "dead" and the 16:9 image with enough pixels to qualify as true HDTV. So Hitach's forthcoming DVD camcorder should be met with much skepticism. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
