New video camera with a hard drive

New York Times technology columnist David Pogue calls it an "aha moment": JVC has a new video camera that records directly to a hard drive in the camera itself. This innovation allows the camera's user to skip a step in loading the video onto a PC. Instead of playing video in real time from a tape, video can now be shifted to a computer in the same way audio is quickly transferred to an iPod.

The camera, the JVC Everio G series, sells for about $800 and has a 20 gigabyte hard drive. (That's the GZ-MG20 model; the GZ-MG50 model has a 30 gigabyte drive.) The camera does not use tape.