New DVD Recorder With 52 hours Of HDD Recording Time

BlueQuark writes "I thought that this is cool. Everybody needs one. When I was liviving in Tokyo about a year and a half ago, Pioneer just released a DVD Recorder, which was quite nice. Now it looks like Panasonic will have one that does 52 hours. It's about 200,000 yen or about $1709.00 @ 117.76Tokyo's Y/$ rate. The blurb is a bit short, but can be found here. Or here is a more complete press release which is at Matsushita's site."

Comments

Media company responese?

[plaisted]

Looks like TiVo that retails for $2000 and writes to DVDs. Won't the media companies try to block this in any way they can? With TiVo you had to hack your unit to be able to read from the hard drive and get the video on your computer so you could post it on the net, but with this you just write to a DVD and then read it to your computer.

Of course, if this becomes popular then maybe CmdrTaco won't have to complain about having missed the Enterprise pilot episode.

some specifics

[Alien54]

By combining an HDD with a DVD recorder, the new unit enables a maximum of 52 hours of recording on the HDD and 12 hours on DVD-RAM discs to realize easy editing and storage of recorded TV broadcasts and images from digital video cameras. [...] The internal 40 GB HDD makes possible up to 52 hours of extended recording in EP mode to the HDD and 12 hours to a double-sided DVD-RAM disc. [...] High-speed dubbing at 22 Mbps from the HDD to DVD-RAM can be done with the touch of a single button, enabling 12x speed in EP mode at its quickest (e.g., a one-hour program can be dubbed in just 5 minutes). Dubbing from DVD-RAM to the HDD is available as well.

don't forget those essential copy protection features!