Hardware US geeks dream about - a reality in Japan

Tokyo - It's no secret anymore that consumers in Japan get the latest tech toys months and sometimes years earlier than the rest of the world. We hopped across the Pacific Ocean to Tokyo to look for some of current technology: With a video camcorder in hand, we wandered into Sony's Ginza building and discovered that inside this famous landmark and got a first hand impression what soon may be on its way to North America.

These days, the 4.7 Gigabyte DVD disc is on the high-end of our optical storage capacity, as we are still waiting for Blu-Ray to reach our shores. The Japanese don't have this problem as they have been able to purchase Blu-Ray recorders/players for a while. In fact, Sony is already selling their second generation of recorders. The single-side cartridge media holds 23 GB, with plenty of room for future improvement.

The Vaio Type X Desktop is another technological wonder that is only available in Japan. At first glance, this computer looks plain with a featureless, shiny black exterior, but with a push of a button, a panel slides away to reveal a CD drive and memory slots. The PC is powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.6 Ghz CPU and one Gigabyte of RAM. Four 250 Gigabyte hard-drives gives you one TByte of storage and if that wasn't enough seven (!) TV tuners ensure that you can record enough video to fill up that storage.

The technological landscape isn't completely barren for the United States as Sony demonstrated their latest HDR-HC1 Handycam, which is currently available in the States for around $2000. This handheld camcorder, like its bigger brothers the FX1 and HU1, records in Sony's HDV format, which is 1440 x 1080 pixels. Most competing camcorders record at 720 X 480 pixels. The "high-definition" video from the HDR-HC1 is encoded onto a MiniDV tape as a 25 Megabit-per-second stream.

The high-quality Carl Zeiss lens has a ten times optical zoom and the camcorder uses electronic image stabilization. Unlike most other camcorders in the price range, the HDR-HC1 uses a single CMOS sensor, instead of triple CCD sensors. So far, the camcorder has received excellent reviews from the press.

Why do the Japanese get the cool gadgets first? No one has a clear answer, but eventually everything trickles down to the USA. Blu-Ray will eventually be available in the United States, but by then the Japanese will probably be able to buy 3rd or 4rd generation Blu-Ray recorders. For now, we just have to make due with the HDR-HC1 camcorder.

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