decent camcorder with a HDD?

[spasmoid]

I'm looking to upgrade to a new camcorder soon, but I'm waiting for someone to release one with a built-in HDD (rather than this optical media burner non-sense).

Anyone seen such a thing?

I know the archos (HDD based walkman/juke-box thingy) has a plugin camera accessory but I'm looking for something with a decent quality optical zoom lense. The sort of quality your typical $1500 handy cam has to offer.

I wish panasonic, sony, canon or any of those popular brands would hurry up and implement it :/

preferably with a "replaceable" laptop IDE drive - but I know I'm just dreaming when it comes to such a sensible idea :/
Even a crummy 20GB drive would be better than nothing - preferably it comes in 40GB/80GB options.

I've had it with tapes. And I don't think having to feed the thing other kinds of media like blank opticals (or even flash mem) is really a solution.

Not only will you be able to record longer chunks in one hit, you will also be able to "clear" the data off more easily (via a USB 2.0 link as a removable drive), it will consume less power than a burner are tape mechanism so it will also extend battery life.

It would also be a bonus if it continued to support iEEE1394 (in addition to the usb 2.0 link) with the digital playback device interface. That way you can still do batch capturing etc if that is your preferred mode of working. On the other hand, if the codec allowed you to access the files (on removeable drive) with VirtualDub, then you could extract the segments you wanted in batch mode - optionally converting/recompressing on the fly.

File management will need to be handled inteligently or it will make a mess of the usability :\
Even if you can't manage files and it simply dumps a sequence of numbered recorded files, it would still be a vast improvement on tapes/disks.

hopefully they don't bollucks it up by forcing you to use an mpeg codec. A choice of something like the Canopus codec would be nice. Then at least the quality would stand a chance... Even if it means you have to install a proprietary codec on the PC to play it.

Eliminating the need to open the thing to administer removable media would also make it more dust-proof and reliable. Who knows, maybe even water resistant (which I desparately needed on my trip to New Zealand with all the geothermic steam footage).

oh, how i pine for the day...

[Bilal]

you should be an inventor, send an email to sony or something, it would be a very good idea, but wouldn't it waste more battery if the HDD has to keep spinning, i know some DV cameras have memory cards but not HDD but i am sure they thought or thinking about it.

[aanaravs]

I use my Canon XL1s and my GL2 by connecting it to a harddrive. Search for 'firestore' online

[satviewer2000]

I believe I read about a year ago in Popular Science that one of the Korean electronic companies (Samsung???) was to come out with exactly what you are referring to ... ie. a hard drive based camcorder.

I have yet to see it in stores however.

The other similar thing to what you are talking about is the Sanyo Xacti flashcard based camcorder. I'm not sure about the quality of output (probably MPEG-4) but it claims to have "DVD quality".