Hitachi DZ-BD10HA review

As mentioned earlier, one of the finer features of the DZ-BD10HA is being able to transfer the HD video between the hard drive, BD/DVD drive, and SD-card slot. Doing this is straightforward, requiring little more than selecting what you want transferred to where. When dubbing from either the hard drive or the card slot, the camcorder will report the number of discs it will take to dub all the scenes that have been selected. Each 3-inch BD disc can hold 7.5GB, or 1 hour of best-quality HD video, which means it would take four to five discs to transfer a full hard disk. (At roughly $20 for a BD-R and $30 for a rewritable BD-RE, it's not something you'll probably want to do regularly.) The dubbing speed is rated at 4x, so a full hour of HD video will take 15 minutes to transfer to a BD-R disc. Finalizing the disc for playback takes a minute, too. There's also the option to transcode HD to standard def for use on DVDs.

The main advantage of recording to Blu-ray instead of a standard DVD is the higher capacity of the discs; Blu-ray uses the same compression and encoding algorithms as AVCHD, which competitors like Sony, Canon, and Panasonic use to record to standard DVDs (as well as other formats). And AVCHD discs will play in your Blu-ray player.

Everything about this camcorder seems slow. It's slow to access drives. It's slow to store photos and prepare for the next shot. It's occasionally slow to focus. It's slow to switch between storage modes; for instance, toggling from recording to BD/DVD to the hard drive takes about 10 seconds, which can seem like an eternity depending on what you're trying to capture. Also, since you can only store photos on a card, there's no chance you'll catch a quick snapshot if you have to switch from the optical or hard drives. Thankfully, the menu system is fairly generic or else I'm sure it would be slow to navigate as well. Battery life isn't great, either; it's rated at 80 minutes, though I averaged less than an hour as I frequently switched between the storage modes.

On the other hand, the video produced by the 7-megapixel 1/2.7-inch CMOS sensor looks very good. In bright conditions, white balance and colors are accurate and video has the detail and sharpness you expect from HD. Played on a 52-inch 1080p LCD HDTV, we saw few artifacts and little noise, and had no issues playing back the BD-RE disc in a current set-top Blu-ray player. Low-light performance isn't as good, but still decent; video seems to soften and pick up a noticeable graininess. The results remain enjoyable, however. The high- to standard-def transcoded video turned out better than expected, all things considered, and the built-in mic works well.

Still photos in well-lit conditions are above average for a camcorder. Much like the standard-definition JVC MG730's 7-megapixel stills, they have some artifacts and the colors are a bit off, but they're high enough resolution to be useful. But indoors quality degrades, increasing noise and losing detail, relegating your results to Web use at small sizes. Using the flash also seemed to do more harm than good.

Many models transfer HD video to and from removable flash media to an internal hard drive, internal flash memory, or removable DVD-R/RW, though none in a single model. Hitachi's the only company that does. But keep in mind that optical discs are a poor choice for recording; they're more prone to critical data errors that can ruin the entire disc than other formats, and the discs are lower capacity than the alternatives. So unless you really like the convenience of the all-in-one design and don't mind paying a premium for it, you might be better off with a flash- or hard-disk-based camcorder that docks to a DVD recorder if you really want PC-free DVD copies; that way you don't have to carry the optical drive around with you. While the Hitachi DZ-BD10HA is a decent HD camcorder, in exchange for the limited attractions of Blu-ray recording you'll be stuck with a clunky design, slow performance, and limited feature set.