When miniDV based camcorders hit the market, people found their size to be remarkable compared to the video recorders of old. Then along came DVD-based units that offered incredible storage capacity, and now the latest trend is for camcorders to house multi-gigabyte hard drives. Samsung might not be ready to take the HDD plunge just yet, so they’re offering the new VM-DC160 and VM-DC560 handheld DVD camcorders.

They’ve kept the user interface simple and straight forward, which seems to indicate that this was designed with the family vacation user in mind. The translation gets a little murky, but from what I can gather, these new players are capable of doing between 30 and 60fps, and while the DC560 has 26x optical zoom, the DC160 bumps that number up to 33 (that could be a typo, given that the DC560 is presumably the higher model).

Other key features on both machines include a 2.7-inch widescreen LCD, and an SD expansion slot for additional memory. No word on availability, but the DC160 and DC560 have been priced at about $624 and $729, respectively.