Solid-state disks, hard-disk drive replacements filled with flash memory chips, have become popular in the laptop computing space and now they're expanding to other markets. At this week's International Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung Electronics will unveil an SSD-based camcorder, it said Tuesday.
Camcorders with hard-disk drives have been available for some years and offer a simpler solution than tape-based systems for people who want to edit video on a PC. The new SSD camcorder has all the same advantages and improves over hard-disk drives in some areas. Most notably the startup time for the SSD model is virtually instant. Users can start recording as soon as the camera is switched on compared with having to wait up to five seconds with the hard-disk drive model.
The SSD models are also lighter, more resilient to vibration and shock and operate more quietly than hard-disk models, Samsung said.
Samsung will offer three SSD-equipped models. The HMX-H106 offers 64GB of recording space and can be expanded using an SD memory card. Two additional models, the HMX-H105 and -H104, offer 32GB and 16GB of space, respectively. A fourth model, the HMX-H100, has no SSD and requires the use of an SD card.
The cameras record in 1920-by-1080 pixel full high-definition using the MPEG4 H.264 format, and the 64GB of recording space on the top-end model works out to 12 hours of recording time, said Samsung.
Pricing for the camcorders wasn't immediately announced. The H105, H104 and H100 will be available in the U.S. from March while the H106 will follow in April. Launch plans for overseas markets also were not announced.
