In the land of digital video, the consumer is king. Even so, consumers can feel slightly overwhelmed by the choice of digital video now available. Hence Hitachi's new idea. Why choose between Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and DVD, it argues, when one camcorder can give you both?

Packed inside the HS500 is a 30GB HDD, and an 8cm DVD drive that's compatible with DVD-RAM, -RW, -R and Plus RW media. But is Hitachi really offering a two-for-one best of both worlds, or is it just a manufacturer unsure which way a declining camcorder market is heading trying to hedge its bets?

Design and layout

There's nothing remarkable about the HS500's design, save for the fact that it has merged HDD and DVD drives into a camcorder that's no bigger than your average standalone DVD or HDD cam.

The HS500 provides a steady shooting platform, the 505g weight making it easy to hold the camcorder steady. It's comfortable to use and you can access major external controls with your shooting hand.

A button above the 2.7in LCD screen activates the onscreen menu system, which is then navigated using a multi-selector pad. The menu is laid out in a predictable way to make it easy to scroll through, and select from. Our only complaint is that the multi-selector pad is too small for most fingers and would benefit from having more pronounced ridges - or really, be more like a joystick.

Design elements that are worthy of praise include a Quick Start button that allows you to get the camcorder ready for shooting in around one second.

This also helps to get the most out of the lithium-ion battery, which we felt drained very quickly when shooting in continuous mode. We also liked the zoom control, which is smooth and, unusually for a non-enthusiast camcorder, offers slow zooms rather than the much-too-fast variety.

We were a little aggrieved that you can't snap digital stills in either HDD or DVD mode. Instead you have to switch to SD card mode if you want to capture photos. DVD and Hard Drive are both capable of storing a mixture of media, so it shouldn't be a problem.

And, the small array of buttons - which actually look after some important features - behind the LCD screen would really benefit from being more user-friendly. The buttons themselves are adequately large but they're simply not responsive enough.

Features

Where HDD and DVD benefit over tape is in the way they allow users to manipulate and play with footage almost immediately. With footage shot in both media it's possible to create playlists of your favourite clips, delete, divide or combine clips and add titles to clips so you have something to jog your memory.

What's also practical about the HS500 is that it features a one-step dubbing function allowing you to transfer footage from HDD to a DVD disc in your camcorder and to burn the disc, enabling it to be played in a home DVD player or computer drive.

You can capture footage to HDD and DVD (or both). In our test we shot footage in the maximum resolution XTRA mode in HDD and also in the XTRA mode using a blank DVD-R. You also have the option to record to DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD Plus RW 8cm discs.

Before you make your choice, however, it's worth finding out what each disc can offer. We found we couldn't access editing functions with DVD-R, but could using Plus RW and RAM.