As we speak there are several companies due to launch HD PVR's in the next couple of months. Direct TV showed a unit at CES this year with a 250 Gig hard drive and two tuners so that you can record one program while watching another. No price tag yet. They claim that you can record 30 hours of HDTV on the drive and 200 hours of SDTV. I suspect that these numbers are for the EP setting which will certainly sacrifice resolution for increased storage capacity. My Panny E100H has a 120 Gig drive and is rated for around 140 or so hours on the EP mode. That is the way that Panasonic advertises it because the numbers are impressive. The catch is that the picture quality suffers a lot on EP mode. SP mode is the best all around mode that delivers around 55 hours on the 120 Gig drive with a fantastic picture and sound. You can move up to XP mode which is the highest resolution mode and only get around 35 hours on a 120 Gig drive. I really can't tell that much of a difference between XP and SP, so I use SP almost all the time.

The big point here is that the 250 Gig drive on Direct Tv's HDTV PVR is not going to go very far when recording HD feeds with SP or higher resolutions. Why bother recording HD material if you are going to compress the hell out of it to increase storage space and degrade the picture? My guess is that if you expect to record HDTV in 1080i at SP resolution you're going to need more than 250 Gigs. At SP I bet that 250 Gigs holds no more than 10-15 hours of native 1080i materal max. The "real" HD PVR's are going to sport the new 500 Gig drives and do so in multiples. Expect to see dual 500 Gig drives (1 Terabyte) in upcoming PVR's. That is where I think we are headed.

Regarding Digital Camcorders, the devices with 3 CCD's are definitely the best. JVC just introduced a 3 CCD recorder capable of HDTV (1080i) resolution. Its just $3499.00.......I'll take 3 at that low price. Expect to see more HDTV digital camcorders using miniDV format for much lower prices coming up in the next year or two. Most commercial shooters use the Sony and Canon commercial DV cams. These suckers range in price from $5000-$12000 depending on setup and features. Both Sony and Canon have pseudo-commercial units with Leica lenses and 3CCD chips that cost in the $3000-$4000 range, but these are still just 480i units. Save your coin for the HD models that will be coming very soon and will blow the old ones away. However, to enjoy the capibilities of the new units you must be set up for HDTV at home. Its going to be a while before the masses get up to speed, so that means that the 480i units are not going away any time soon.