JVC Everio Among Host of Category-Defining Products to Debut Exclusively on Hitachi Hard Drives
SAN JOSE, Calif, Sept. 1, 2005 – JVC has featured hard drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in its current Everio line of camcorders, including two new products that use the Hitachi one-inch Microdrive and 1.8-inch Travelstar.
As the world’s first provider of hard-drive-based consumer camcorders, JVC turned to the most established supplier of small-form-factor hard drives to ensure its category-defining camcorders would be a success. JVC chose Hitachi for the company’s long-standing leadership in small-form-factor hard drives and unmatched support for integrating hard drives into consumer electronic devices.
JVC’s selection of Hitachi as the hard-drive provider for the Everio camcorder line puts it among a long list of CE device manufacturers who have trusted Hitachi hard drives for their debut product platform. Hitachi hard drives were used in the first hard-drive-based digital still camera, MP3 player, personal digital assistant, mobile manager, personal media player and, now, the first camcorder.
“Relationships like the one we have with JVC offer the strongest validation for the time and effort Hitachi spends to achieve high-quality hard drives that our customers and their customers can depend on,” said Bill Healy, senior vice president, product marketing and strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “We have great satisfaction in knowing our hard drives are trusted to play such a crucial role in bringing new capabilities to consumer devices, such as the JVC Everio.”
“Because of JVC’s commitment to high quality, it was very important that we choose the most reliable components possible for our new camcorders, especially one as important as the hard drive,” said Ryuhei Nakazawa, general manager, camcorder category, AV & Multimedia Company, Victor Company of Japan, Limited. “We put the Microdrive and Travelstar drives through vigorous testing and they both stood up to the Hitachi promise of quality and reliability.”
Why hard drives, why Hitachi?
JVC’s decision to use hard drives as a means of storage on its new Everio camcorders was driven by consumer demand for greater portability and storage capacity and more flexibility in data manipulation. These criteria are able to be met with the use of small-form-factor, high-capacity hard disk drives.
High storage capacity offered on the Hitachi Microdrive and Travelstar hard drives means users still have a compact and portable device with long recording capability, but do not have to carry bulky disks and tapes with them. With 4 GB of storage on a removable Hitachi Microdrive, the original Everio camcorder can record up to 60-minutes of DVD-quality video or thousands of high-resolution still pictures. The new Everio G line offers up to seven hours of DVD-quality recording on 20-30 GB of storage on the Hitachi Travelstar. Both Everio products are currently available and in great demand worldwide for their high quality and high capacity.
Another benefit in using hard drives in JVC’s new camcorders is the ease in data manipulation due to the ability to randomly access and delete video content. Users are able to call up their content instantaneously without fast-forwarding or rewinding tapes. Similarly, they are able to delete their content effortless, but there’s also no danger of mistakenly recording over content that was meant to be saved. For the more sophisticated user, video editing is also easier as hard drive content can be easily transferred to the computer, rather than having to be converted to digital format first, as is the case when using tape.
Because of the affordable, high storage capacity that hard drives offer, their use in consumer electronics has grown exponentially with consumer’s growing appetite for portable, digital entertainment and personal data. To further aid the adoption of hard drives into consumer devices, Hitachi has developed hard drives that are specific to the needs to CE device manufactures and their customers. Hitachi CE-focused hard drives take into consideration attributes that are important to the end user: physical size of the hard drive and thus the device, the battery life, the shock requirements, the high capacity and, most importantly, the value that hard drives offer over alternate storage technologies.
About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a result of the strategic combination of Hitachi’s and IBM’s storage technology businesses. Hitachi GST is the industry’s second largest hard disk drive manufacturer in revenue.
The company’s goal is to enable users to fully engage in the digital lifestyle by providing access to large amounts of storage capacity in formats suitable for the office, on the road and in the home. The company offers customers worldwide a comprehensive range of storage products for desktop computers, high-performance servers and mobile devices. For more information on Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, please visit the company’s Web site at http://www.hitachigst.com.
About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE:HIT), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 347,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2004 (ended March 31, 2005) consolidated sales totaled 9,027.0 billion yen ($84.4 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s Website at http://www.hitachi.com.
