Japanese consumer electronics giant Hitachi has officially said that they are planning to launch digital video camcorders, the BD70E and BD7HE based on Blu-ray Disc in Europe from October onwards.

The BD70E and BD7HE Blu-ray supporting camcorders are able to record directly on to Blu-ray discs, allowing instant playback in any compatible player. Both the Blu-ray camcorders from Hitachi features 5.3-megapixel CMOS sensors and stores 1920×1080 Full HD video on 8cm Blu-ray disc media. Plus, they will also be able to output to display devices via HDMI port.

The Hitachi BD70E and BD7HE camcorders will use 8cm mini Blu-ray discs or 8cm DVD-RAM, RW, R and +RW media. In particular, the Hitachi BD70E camcorder sports a Blu-ray disc and Multiformat plus DVD burner drive. On the other hand, the Hitachi BD7HE has an integrated Hybrid Blu-ray disc plus hard disk drive camcorder with a 30GB HDD as well as an 8cm Blu-ray disc and Multiformat plus DVD burner drive.

The BD7HE uses the company's MPEG 4 AVC/H.264 compression to copy Full HD files to Blu-ray disc at a rapid rate. This Hybrid Blu-ray disc + HDD technology enables to create multiple copies of Full HD Blu-ray discs.

Using these camcorders one can select the standard quality mode while recording, delivering up to 2 hours of recording time on the BD70E and up to 8 hours on the BD7HE's integrated hard disk drive. Both the Hitachi BD70E and BD7HE camcorders can utilize compact 8cm 7.5GB Blu-ray discs in wither recordable (BD-R) or re-writable (BD-RE) formats.

The Hitachi BD70E and BD7HE are expected to be available in Europe in October 2007. The price of these camcorders, however, remains unknown.