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We were shocked, shocked! when Aiptek rolled out a $299 720p GO-HD camcorder last May, but now the company’s topped that pinnacle of cheapness with the Aiptek 720p A-HD camcorder, a stripped-down version of its piece-of-shit brandmate, rolling in at a rock-bottom $169.99.

The company’s taken out the optical zoom and substituted a 4x digital zoom (which to us doesn’t even count as a zoom at all), but kept that inexplicable 2.4-inch 4×3 LCD viewscreen, apparently too cheap to actually offer the widescreen 16×9 view of typical HD camcorders. But the thing actually shoots in 1280×720 16×9. Go figure. Look out for this one, coming soon to a cereal box near you. Maybe they’ll offer it as a Cracker Jacks prize. The only thing we can see using this for would be a disposable crashcam. [Aiptek, via Digital Camcorder News]