Despite its muscles in other parts of the audiovisual market, Toshiba is surprisingly not a big name in camcorders. But back in 2006, it launched the Gigashot range, taking advantage of new video formats that record on hard disk, a technological key to Toshiba. While receiving the first models was somewhat muted, Toshiba has continued to expand its Gigashots, and the last in line with the objectives of the premium high definition market - which is increasingly where the action is. With a 100GB hard drive, the Gigashot A100FE hopes to compete alongside Sony, Panasonic and Canon. But does it have what it takes?

Thanks to the hard drive, the Toshiba is not as light as some of the camcorders we have seen recently, such as the Sony HDR-CX6EK or Panasonic HDC-SD9. Weighing approximately half a kilo, and measuring about 14cm long, surely you want a camcorder carry bag. As with Canon and Sony HD camcorders, the Gigashot uses a CMOS. It is a sensor of the same size, too, offering a healthy and 1/3in diagonal of 2.4 megapixels. The camera offers an optical Fujinon 10x optical zoom reasonable, and you can add x20 and x80 digital zoom on the roof, if you like your images as a whole.

Like almost all the new high-definition camcorder these days, the Gigashot uses the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression. In this case, it is not the AVCHD standard, but rather something called HDMV. This is part of the Blu-ray specification. There are three modes available - XQ, HQ and SP. The top XQ mode boasts 18Mbits/sec - a rate even higher than the data from Panasonic HDC-SD9 and HS9, although the images are interlaced rather than progressive scanned. AC operates at 12Mbits/sec to 9Mbits/sec and SP.

Even in the mode of superior quality, hard drive capacity of 100 GB is sufficient for 12 hours of film - and twice that in SP. The mode XQ records of 1920 x 1080, while the two lowest use of 1440 x 1080, but they all operate at 30 frames / sec, rather than the Europe 25 frames / sec. This could pose compatibility problems with some European audiovisual equipment. Still images only have two options - large and normal. These data correspond to the resolutions of 1920 x 1080 and 1440 x 1080 respectively.