News

Fastest flash card, newest camcorder, fattest pixel count ...

A four megapixel camera has been launched at Photokina 2004 in Cologne, Germany. It is also a two-hour digital camcorder, and features "the world's fastest Flash memory card" according to Pretec.

The camera/corder is the Pretec DV6403, and it's due for availability in time for Xmas, they hope. Prices start at $399.

"Pretec has been pioneering the world's first two-megapixel DSC and MPEG4 tapeless digital camcorder with 30 fps VHS TV quality, available in the market since early 2003," boasted the official announcement at the show. This device is the same thing, but with much higher resolution.

"We've increased the resolution - up to 400% better - making the moving picture quality DVD-like as appeared to the consumer's eyes," the company announced, somewhat cryptically.

The Pretec DV6403 offers standard VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second and (importantly for video) has a 4X digital zoom, enabling silent trucking effects. It also has a 3X lens zoom, for the still camera, at 4 megapixels.

"It is the world's lightest and most compact high performance digital camcorder in its class," claims Pretec. Not only using compressed video format of SP (Simple Profile), DV6403 can also adopt ASP (Advanced Simple Profile), enabling high quality and high-definition video experience.

With bundled or optional Pretec SD/MMC card, users can get more than two hours of video.

Pretec 1GB SD/MMC is the largest capacity SD/MMC in the market today and with write speed of 18 MB/s (unclear whether that's supposed to be bits or bytes! - but rated 120X) Pretec MMC 4.0 card "is the fastest flash memory card on earth." No suggestion, however, that the camera won't work just fine with an "ordinary" Flash card ...

Distributor details from Pretec and UK distributor is Jacton