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The company has launched two models: the BD70E Blu-ray disc Camcorder and the BD7HE Blu-ray disc and Hard Disk Drive Camcorder.

Both are the first high-definition camcorders to abandon DV tape in favour of permanent optical storage, with Hitachi claiming that each 8cm Blu-ray disc will store up to 60 minutes of 1,920 x 1,080 footage.

Both cameras are also backwards-compatible with 8cm DVD discs. Maxell is set to be the first disc manufacturer

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to supply blank media. But eagle-eyed show-goers will have spotted Verbatim's first 8cm writable Blu-ray discs in a different hall.

The image processing is handled by a 5.3 megapixel CMOS sensor, the highest resolution sensor currently available in a camcorder. Hitachi also uses its Picture Master Full HD processing, which it claims is up to twice as fast as MPEG2 compression.

The BD7HE has an integrated 30GB hard disk, which Hitachi claims will store up to four hours of HD footage. Once the footage is captured, it can be edited on the camera and burnt to a blank disc.

But Blu-ray remains in its infancy, and faces a multitude of threats, not least the competition posed by HD DVD and the plummeting price of solid state storage. It's also possible to store HD video on tape, although Hitachi's product marketing manager, Roland Fritsch, claims that write-once Blu-ray discs were "now cheaper".

The same can't be said for the cameras - the hard disk version will cost £1,499 and the standard version £1,299.