Tom’s Hardware took a look at Aiptek’s handy Full-HD camcorder at CeBIT. The small video camera records up to 8 hours of material at 1080p and comes with a moderate €250 price tag.

The light camcorder weighs only 177 grams (without battery) and possesses a 3x optical zoom. Its CMOS image sensor uses a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. HD material is recorded in 1080p and 16:9 format, while standard definition recordings are limited to a 4:3 aspect ratio. SDHC cards with up to 32 GBytes are the storage medium of choice. Only 32 MB of storage are built into the device - only enough for a few snapshots, but not for HD-videos.

Aiptek uses an AVC/H.264 video codec, which allows recording times of up to 15 minutes per GByte. Using a 32 GByte SDHC card, that would give you 8 hours of recording time. Although €250 is comparatively affordable for a Full-HD camcorder, don’t forget to factor in the price for an SDHC medium. At around €150, SDHC cards of this size are still rather expensive.

Aiptek’s PocketDV AHD Z500 sports a swiveling 2.4" LC display, an HD-compliant output and can be attached to HD or SD TV sets using an adapter cable.

Aiptek at CeBIT 2008: Hall 26/stand A37

Technical Data:

• HD 1080p Recording, 1.5 million pixels in 16: 9 format
• 3x optical auto focus zoom
• 5 megapixel CMOS image sensor (2592 x 1944)
• Supported Formats: MOV (AVC / H.264), JPEG, WAV
• 2.4 inch 6 cm LCD colour display
• Flash
• Internal storage: 32 MB
• SD-/SDHC-/MMC card slot
• Integrated microphone
• 10-second auto-timer
• HDTV output supporting NTSC and PAL
• USB 2.0 port
• Power supply via power brick or USB
• Dimensions (W/L/H): ca. 11.3/7.0/3.3 cm
• Weight: 177 g
• Price: €249