"We think we're going after the mainstream consumer. These are consumers that are looking for something small with traditional camcorder features. And we think there's a huge market for this category of camcorder. We've seen the same trend happen in the audio industry and digital still. They're looking for small, they're looking for great capacity. And we think that we've got an answer to their needs."
The cameras will begin arriving on store shelves in August. Unlike camcorders that use flash memory and store video in what's called the MPEG 4 format, these use MPEG 2, the same compression used in DVD movies. And about the fragility of the hard drives in the cameras, Owen says…
"To protect the hard drive, we've also included gel, so we can protect the hard drive when it is dropped. Also, we have drop protection so if the camcorder does detect that the camera is being dropped, the camcorder will actually shut off and the armature will move away from the hard drive, protecting the hard drive."
And instead of having to play tape back into a PC to edit video, you can simply drag and drop the files. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.