DMN Interview: JVC’s Dave Walton
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DMN: Can you give us a little hint here and there about what JVC might be showing at NAB as far as these camcorders go, and other products, too.
Walton: One of the new products we’re going to have is called the CU-VH1U. (I don’t know where they come up with these model numbers.)
DMN: It really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it, Dave?
Walton: The CU-VH1U. I can remember the VH1 part, that’s the easy part. I don’t know where they came up with CU -- maybe it's “Cool Unit”, but what this is a little, amazingly compact recorder that is a perfect companion to the camcorder. It allows you to transfer to and from your editing system without using the camera. It has the MiniDV tape transport in it, to take the HDV tapes. It records and it plays. It’s really a small, portable unit; we call it a clamshell because it is so small. And it has a flip-up LCD screen on it.
DMN: It sounds like the next piece of the puzzle there.
Walton: It has true HD recording in the 720p mode, with the IEEE1394 input. It’ll play back 720p/30, 480/60p 480i recordings. It has a component output with BNC connectors that’ll also give you 720p/60 or 1080i, for any kind of monitor it does transcoding for the 720p/30 to 1080i if that’s what your intended output is. It adheres to the HDV format. , The LCD screen is 3.5 inches. If you have two of these, or if you have one of these in your camera, you can make digital clones of your source material. You can dub and distribute HDV. If you want to just take your HD program into the field and show it to somebody, it’s sure a lot easier than carrying even a DVHS machine around because you now have a small recorder that’s the size of a book. It’s a very tiny recorder.
DMN: That’s probably priced similarly to the HD10U, right?
Walton: It’s going to be less money than the HD10U because it’s not a camera. I can’t give you the exact price, but it’ll be very sensibly priced. It certainly is a definite piece of the puzzle. It’s a very nice pro unit. At NAB you’ll see more announcements by the third party companies with support of the HDV format. [At press time, JVC announced the CU-VH1U would be priced at $1,999 -- CW]
DMN: We’ll probably be seeing those all around, Ulead, Pinnacle, Matrox, others?
Walton: These negotiations are still going on, even as of yesterday we were still unsure what we could and couldn’t talk about with respect to additional HDV products – cameras, recorders, that sort of thing.
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DMN: So we’ll have to visit you at NAB and get the full lowdown on the rest of the products.
Walton: That’s right. That’s probably going to be the earliest that I can give you any additional information about that, unfortunately.
DMN: Now that you’re selling HD camcorders, it looks to me like, from JVC’s perspective, this is going to be great for business. Not only will people want the camcorders, but they’ll need a family of products to display and edit their footage. I guess, by extension, you’re probably selling a lot of flat panel displays that are capable of HD right now, for all these people who have the camcorder.
Walton: Yes, the plasma display panels are outselling everything. It’s hard to say how many of those are actually going with the cameras, and how many are just selling because people want cool flat panel displays. They are selling so well that it’s hard to make that differentiation. Certainly I can correlate the sales of DVHS machines with the camcorders, and the CineForm products can be correlated with the HD. We’ve seen an overall increase in all of the sales of our HD products. If I were to be asked what is the biggest growth area currently and in the future for JVC, I would say it was in the field of HD, because HD is coming on, it’s accelerating at a nonlinear rate, it is just going to be gigantic.
DMN: And the prices are plummeting, particularly for plasma displays. Do you see prices continuing to drop on plasma displays? Do you think people are going to be going more for the true HD displays instead of the just the extended definition ones?
Walton: Well, I think it has a lot to do with price, quite honestly. When you feed a high definition signal into even the extended definition display, it looks fabulous. It’s just mind-boggling how good a DVHS signal, for example, looks in one of our standard 42-inch plasma displays. It looks stunning. And people who see that are looking at pictures that are sharper than they have ever experienced in their lives. So the high definition will drive both the extended and high definition models. It’s a matter of cost to the buyer. Certainly the higher definition plasmas are sharper, clearer, but certainly there’s nothing wrong with the extended definition.
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