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" Last year, Toshiba teased everyone with the announcement of an HD DVD player by the end of 2005, which never happened. The company also teased us personally with a sneak-peek at a digital camcorder that had an internal hard drive. PM proceeded to give the HD DVD player an Editor&amp;#039;s Choice Award at last year&amp;#039;s CES, while waiting anxiously for hard details on the hard-drive camcorder. Well, don&amp;#039;t we feel silly. This year, both products are actually coming out. ... No, really, we have prices and everything. Toshiba is releasing two HD DVD players in 2006, at $499.99 and $799.99, as this year&amp;#039;s CES shapes up to be the first major front in the high-stakes war between the HD DVD and Blu-Ray formats. LG and Pioneer have both announced Blu-Ray-compatible products for 2006. But the momentum behind Toshiba&amp;#039;s HD DVD player release has been building for a long time (thus our slightly overzealous award in &amp;#039;05). And the &amp;quot;entry-level&amp;quot; HD-A1 and higher-end HD-XA1 are due to ship this March, making them the first HD DVD players to become available in the United States. Both players are designed to accommodate the growing popularity of HDTVs, using HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) to connect to existing monitors, and the HD-XA1 has two front-facing USB ports to accomodate, according to Toshiba, game controllers. Why? Well, sometimes companies like to demonstrate some sort of gaming functionality, with half-veiled threats of challenging Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony in the console market. But it never happens. And not to leave the less-than-bleeding-edge in the dust, the players are backward-compatible, playing CDs and standard, non-HD DVDs. Though the current lineup of HD DVD content is essentially nil, these players have the potential to usher in the next great leap in home entertainment. Unless Blu-Ray kills HD DVD, that is. The other Toshiba product line that caught our eye has nothing to do with next-generation formats. The Gigashot 30GB and 60GB camcorders could finally make digital camcorders as simple as everyone wants--no, needs--them to be. Instead of fiddling with tapes, digital tapes, internal DVD burners or skimpy flash memory cards, these cameras have their own hard disk drives. The higher-end GSC-R60 model records 55 to 13.5 hours of video (depending on quality, with a maximum of 9.6 Mbps) directly to an internal 1.8-in. hard drive. Footage can be transferred to a PC, to be stored on the computer or burned onto a DVD. Video can also be sent to a DVD recorder, to be burned onto a DVD. Both cameras use a 3 megapixel CCD sensor, with a 2.5-in. LCD display and SD card slots in case you burn through all 30 or 60 gigs. We don&amp;#039;t have the exact weights and dimensions for these cameras, but they&amp;#039;re comparable to other DV camcorders. They&amp;#039;ll retail at $799.99 for the 30GB, and $999.99, for the 60GB, and both are expected to be released in February. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a348/2085086/>