Panasonic's Blu-ray Recorder To Hit Market In July

lunarscape writes "Forbes is reporting that 'Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. on Wednesday unveiled what it calls the world's first DVD recorder that supports single-side, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs with a maximum capacity of 50 gigabytes.' It looks like Sony's own Blu-ray recorder will now have some competition."

Comments

Will it be ready in time?

[k4_pacific]

But will it get to market before it is illegal?

Re:Will it be ready in time?

[Anonymous Coward]

luckily there is the rest of the world to sell to

3 billion chinese and indians would do for a start

No version for computers yet?!

[Ryu2]

It's interesting that the first Blu-Ray recorders are being first marketed as standalone recorders, and there's no version for a computer yet. Usually, it's the other way around (CD/DVD)...

Not much competition to DVD though

[Timesprout]

for the moment anyway. The price tag, form factor and lack of HDTV will I think put most people off these. DVD is adequate for the masses and until something clearly better and more affordable comes these are just expensive gadgets.

Reliable?

[Dayflowers]

Can we really trust these discs? I mean, the CD is a reliable digital support, it will tolerate alot of abuses. We all know that sometimes, a CD with lots and lots of scratches will work just fine. The DVD on the other hand, is alot more sensitive. I've had problems with dvd's where I could hardly see any scratches on the surface, and I've heard some other people complain about it as well. Maybe we're just dumb and don't know how to properly handle them, but still no one can deny that a DVD is alot more sensitive. If these guys says they pub 50gb on a single disk, I can only imagine how sensitive the damn thing will be. They should have some kind of enclosure, like the old 3.5" disks. Those were never reliable, but I can only imagine how much worse they'd be if they had the exposed disk.

Too little, too late

[scovetta]

The storage industry is always too far behind, IMHO. By the time this technology gets affordable, it'll catch the back end of it's usefulness. When tapes were out, I needed 4 or 5 tapes to get my stuff backed up. Then I switched to CD-R, then to DVD-R, now to hard drives. I have around 300 GB to back up, but I refuse to pay for an autoloader or something crazy. If the format held a terabyte, then sure, I'd consider it, but 50 GB = 10 movies. Also consider the cost of storage these days: as of right now, I'm seeing less than $0.50/gig for EIDE hard drives. Unless you're bringing gigabytes of data around with you in your pocket every day, you'd get more for your money with a cheap file server and a bunch of huge drives. As far as the consumer/home market goes, what takes up 50 gig? Are they really going to release all six Star Wars on one 50 GB DVD? Hells no! The only application I see for that is for "Season 1"-type packages, where you're getting 6 or 8 DVDs now anyway, but this technology will not be pervasive anytime soon.

I'll wait...

[djtripp]

I will wait for the HD-DVD format to come about. There are just too many people arguing over the next standard, and until it becomes a standard, I will wait. This is my standard response.