HDTV Camcorders for $799?

[dkennedy]

HDTV Camcorders for $799?

December 12, 2005

By Phillip Swann, TVPredictions.com

With the growth of High-Definition TVs, many consumers would like to have a camcorder that can record in high-def. However, today's HD video cameras cost nearly $2,000.

But Ambarella, a Silicon Valley chip maker, says it has created a new chip that will drive the cost of the HDTV camcorder to under $1,000 in 2006. In fact, some may be as low as $799, the company says.

If true, it could not only drive sales of HDTV camcorders, but it could spark even more interest in HDTV sets.

[dkennedy]

Chip joins camcorder, digital camera

December 12, 2005

By Dean Takahashi, Mercury News

A stealth Silicon Valley semiconductor chip start-up is betting that it can leapfrog bigger video market rivals with chips for high-definition video camcorders that also function as high-quality digital cameras.

Ambarella, a 75-engineer company in Sunnyvale, is announcing today it has created a low-power chip designed to make HD camcorders more practical. Les Kohn, chief technology officer and co-founder, predicts that his company's power-efficient HD chip will make possible smaller, lower cost, and more power-efficient HD camcorder-cameras. Such cameras currently cost about $2,000.

"We think that HD home recording will be the latest breakthrough for video,'' said Kohn, a chip industry veteran who previously worked for Sun Microsystems and C-Cube Microsystems. ``This is the first HD camcorder and digital camera on a chip.''

The new family of chips from Ambarella operate on less than a watt of power, far less than most semiconductor chips, making them ideal for portable gadgets that need a lot of battery life. The chips compress and play back video in a new format called H.264, a high-definition format that will replace the aging MPEG-2 video used today in a variety of technologies. Ambarella has finished its design and expects to sell the chip in the first quarter.

Michelle Abraham, an analyst at market researcher In-Stat, said that HD camcorders are likely to appeal to professional video artists at first, but over time could reach broader markets as prices come down.

"They're betting that there is a market for this high-end device,'' she said. The company will compete with video chip makers such as Texas Instruments, Broadcom, LSI Logic and ST Microelectronics. It will also face off against Sunnyvale start-up Mobilygen, which expects to unveil a similar chip. Ambarella is likely to garner attention because of the pedigree of its founders.

Kohn and Wang worked together at C-Cube Microsystems, where they were key to launching the company's broadcast video encoder chips. They left to create Afara Websystems, a microprocessor company that Sun Microsystems bought in 2002. Sun adopted Afara's approach, creating a chip that could process 32 different programs simultaneously, and this month launched a long-awaited server based on the Afara technology.