Samsung announces SC-HDX15 Flash Camcorder with H.264 compression!
 

Samsung announces SC-HDX15 Flash Camcorder with H.246 compression!

specs:
720P/1280
compression H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 with approx. 16 Mbit/sec (!!)
OIS
HDMI uncompressed out
2.7´´ display
internal 4 GByte flash
external Compact Flash expandable
USB-2 out
price ~1800 $
Q3/06
no pictures yet

i think you mean the samsung?

sanyo came out with one at ces, but maybe samsung's is better.

engadget also has word of this too
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/12/s...0l-and-sc-x20/

oops - sorry, edited!
:-)

funny how some guy in that thread was claiming that it was 720x480p(?)

a step forward nevertheless! thanks for the post.

Thanks Holger.

I was just getting on to post a thread about the h264 codec stuff I found. Look out for it in the news section, but if this uses the same codec chip I could be buy one like it.

Holger, do you have a link, I would like to look that up?

Do you guys think h.264 will replace MPEG-2 as the compressed video format of choice? It seems to be pretty useful as of late and it did wonders for the Sanyo, the footage was amazing for such a little camera! I'd like to see a shootout between the HD1 and the Sony HC1 and see who wins.

If it is 25mb/s, yes. At the lesser rates, I would say wait and see how footage handles motion. In the next year or two I expect hardware acceleration of h264 editing to become cheap (but you still have to buy the editor) until then we would have to suffer with it.

I would like to see a comparison too, but I can guarantee the HC1 would probably win because of the sensor and 25Mb/s versus 9Mb/s on complex moving images. But this Samsung could be using something twice as good with nearly twice as much bandwidth. I imagine it might match the HC1 for complex movement at least. Which is what is really needed, I don't like the 1080i/19mb/s720p thing HDV thing, I think 25Mb/s or 35Mb/s (HDV2) 720p HDV at 25fps, would be better. Now it would be very easy for them to drop HDV and go to h264.

Holger, I looked up probably around a hundred pages and the closet to your 16Mb/s quote I can find is this:

http://translate.google.com/translat...language_tools

So it's about 17.79Mb/s with a metric Gigabyte and around 19.09Mb/s for an old computer style Gigabyte. I assume they are using metric and take some off for the sound etc probably, pretty impressive.

One thing I must say, is that I hope they improve the sound standard to DVD style system (DTS best) bit depth, and number of channels, which could be, wirelessly linked to the unit through UWB (USB2.0/firewire wireless) or wireless networking. Not that we all would have much need for surround sound on a camera like this, but it probably will form a standard for better cameras (work wise) and useful tool if you are documenting or talking to a group of people.

Another link, from last year, claiming hard drive based, but maybe thats been dropped or a separate model. Interesting that their mpeg4 SD camera supports an 720 x 560 / 25fps frame, unlike the 640*480 frames used in a lot of cameras.

http://www.techdigest.tv/2005/08/samsung_hard_di.html
(The picture is the SD model mentioned above).

News on Samsung
 

Well, last week I called up Samsung to find out. The salesman contacted the product manager and rang me back, to tell me that it wouldn't be in Australia until next year. This doesn't necessarily mean that it won't crop up somewhere else first though. I then thought I should ask him if it was possible to get a pre-release tester to test and review it. But when I rang the number straight back, I got a this number is not connected.

Their you go, mysterious phone calls from disconnected numbers, I wonder who is to blame, their telephone company or mine again.

This camera was due to be released in August, as announced around the beginning of the year. Ambarella was expecting h264 cameras around April, down to $799 this year. Then nothing from Ambarella or Samsung.

I feel sorry for Korean companies, having to co-exist with Japanese companies. This camera could potentially be very good with 1/3 inch and 720p exact pixels. We do not have a quality low cost 720p camera. I would love to get a programming kit for this, and test out my advanced ideas for high quality bayer compression. That would put it in front of the competitors models.

If anybody has any further news, and links, can you please share them.


Thanks

Wayne.