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

Posted by timothy on from the japan-gets-all-the-good-stuff-first dept.

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."

15 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Backup solution by Bob+McCown · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How long until something like this is viable for a backup solution? Im not talking about writing a few hundred megs to CD, but full-scale 40G drive backup?

  2. Blue Laser by jedi-monkey · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This has to be a giant step forward in bringing optical disk capacities closer to being in line with current capacities of hard disks.

    Furthermore, this may just be the media necessary to actually record the new streaming formats that are GB's in size.

    1. Re:Blue Laser by Bi()hazard · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The current generation blu-ray systems aren't aimed at people who see hard drives as a practical solution. HD's are fine if all your data is already sitting on another hard drive, but some have very different requirements. As a video editing professional, I have to deal with issues like these-

      1. The data source isn't a computer! A movie camera captures video and outputs through its favorite cable, and all of this happens in the middle of a forest where we're filming a scene. Bringing a huge RAID array along just isn't an option, but bringing a blu-ray burner and possibly a dedicated middleman computer to manage the burns is an interesting possibility.

      2. DVD's can be thrown on spindles of hundreds and stored in the back room until needed. Hard drives take up a lot more space, need to be packaged for storage, and when you take them out you can't just toss it in a reader, you have to hook it up . Sounds easy to you, but these are artists trying to do it, and the tech team doesn't want to have to hold their hand every time somebody hits the archives. Think about your breathing! You have to manually control it or suffocate. Sure, hard drives can be left online all the time, but that still takes up more space while running up huge electricity bills and generating network traffic. Going over the internet is a pain when you want to move 5 terabytes to a different site, and you could just grab a spindle of dvds instead.

      3. Buffer underruns are not an issue, current generation burners are pretty fast, can rely on large amounts of ram for buffering (yes we do put our 8 gig of ram macs to use), and use a lot of high tech tricks to improve reliability. State of the art burners are nothing like those crappy cd burners that used to pump out coasters 5 years ago.

      4. ???

      5. Profit!

      6. All of this is why these things are so ridiculously expensive, and limited in convenience and features at the moment. They're not going to be sold to the guy up near the top of the replies who was complaining about how its yet another toy he can't afford. They're going to be sold to the tech departments of groups like movie studios, who will evaluate them, run some trials and see if it's a viable platform for #1-5 above. By the time everybody's ready to put these into mainstream production work economies of scale will have kicked in and the technology will have matured. Those sales will pay for the third generation blu-ray devices, which will be cheap enough for consumers. And then you can get one and try to underrun it's buffer using a beowulf cluster of linux-based Soviet surplus machines with a 9 megapixel display, bitches.

  3. Big enough to be useful, finally. by EvilNight · · Score: 5, Interesting

    4.5GB DVDs just weren't big enough to back up my data (well, unless I wanted to burn 166 DVDs every 8 months or so). Until something like this I'd had nothing I could use but hard drives... tapes were just too expensive and unreliable (and slow). This will still be slow, I'm sure, but at least it'll make for a good backup medium. It's about f'ing time. Sign me up for one, at least once media prices for it become reasonable. I wonder what the shelf life on their dual-layer media is...

    --
    Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
  4. Nice Pricing Scheme by grunt107 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What is open-price basis? Sounds like a "we'll let people bid until we like a number" pricing scheme. The 50GB capacity is definitely nice - for HD content - but 63 hrs of regular analog? Don't know if that would actually happen or alot of burned DVDs w/1% storage used. I would not think that current DVD owners would burn multiple movies into 1 DVD backup. It would be nice to have a DVD backup of my computer DASD (only 4 disks!!!)

  5. As of today 120 gb of photographs.... by purduephotog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... exist on my HD.

    Now I've archived them all to DVD, 2x for security. That means I need 56 dvds (23 go in an offline jukebox, 23 into a spindle around the block) to be 'safe'.

    Now editing those photos typically creates 89mb images for printing. The largest are the scanned chromes, at 8000LPI from a drum scanner. To give you an idea, this prints natively at 40x60x400LPI on photographic paper.

    What's this mean? It means I damn well want this to hit the commercial market, hard, and cheap ;) It's pretty bad when you have to buy 200 gb HDs and use them to backup your images and stick'em in the closet. There are better uses.

    Of course they have not addressed the longetivity of these disks. Just like Epson made a little blunder, I'd hate to have my data on it offline and find out, 3 months later, that the high levels of smog have eaten it into oblivion.

    (Canon 10D generates 6.4mb/image; each image generates 36mb 16bit Tiff; each tiff is manipulated to create a minimum of a 16x20 print which may have multiple images/reprints)

    1. Re:As of today 120 gb of photographs.... by Capt'n+Hector · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So why don't you buy a few 200 gb hard drives? They'll be more accessable than dvds, cheaper than the blu-ray writer and media, they're scalable and probably most importantly, your data will still exist after a few years. Ever try to load a 5 year old CD-R?

      --
      Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
      Africus aut Europaeus?
  6. Excellent - back to sneakernet! by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm in the middle of downloading 30 GB of data from one of the SOHO instruments; it will take 3 days to get it over our T1. The only advantage of doing the transfer over the net is that putting it on DVDs for mailing would require somebody on their end to monitor and swap out 6-7 DVDs as they're burned, and then somebody on my end to monitor and swap out those DVDs as they're read onto my hard drive. With a Blu-Ray disk they could burn a single medium then drop it in the mail. And I'd still get the data at the same time as my network transfer will finish.

  7. How robust is the media? by Capt'n+Hector · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Are these blu-ray disks as robust as normal CDs and DVDs (hah!) or do they decay like many CD-Rs? I recently tried to load a few old CD-Rs that had been lying around for a while... nothing. Errors all over the place. Will this thing be useful for archiving stuff or only for same-year viewing?

    --
    Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
    Africus aut Europaeus?
  8. Re:So long, tape drive! by Errtu76 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    actually, how about burning an extra 49GB of movies on the dvd, next to knoppix :) Bootable, portable cinema set!

  9. ... not that they're supported by the DVD Forum :( by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I guess that's why I'm using only DVD-R discs today. DVD+R won't play in my DVD player and when I asked about why it didn't support it, the salesman said that DVD+R isn't the standard, and while DVD-R was supported on basically all DVD players, not all supported DVD+R.

    And since I don't want to decide when I buy the discs if I should have DVD movies on them or data, I simply don't bother with DVD+R at all since DVD-R works with both on all standalone DVD players (as long as they support recordable discs of course).

    I wonder if Blu-Ray will face the same destiny: unsupported by next generation DVD players => only widely useful for data storage => impossible to use as a generic format => don't bother with them at all.

    There's a slight difference from today though -- Blu-Ray will get a higher capacity than the standardized HD-DVD format. That will make it interesting to see where things go, since Blu-Ray isn't compatible with the existing DVD spec which HD-DVD is, possibly making it harder to create combo drives like the DVD+/-R drives. I doubt I'd use Blu-Ray though even with that advantage, if I can't play burned DVD's on my standalone player.

    Maybe Sony will get into the same situation as Hewlett-Packard (and more?) currently seems to be in. I recently saw a laptop from HP with a DVD writer that *only* supported DVD+R. Since they want to push their format. Of course, everyone I know saw that as a major disadvantage, and they might even have lost customers for it.

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  10. Stupid Question by Erwos · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But is Blu-Ray backwards-compat to "normal" DVD, or will this mean I'm buying a new DVD drive?

    -Erwos

    --
    Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
  11. At least... by Apocalypse111 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At least with a disk this big, you can't apply any of the "limited viewing window" technologies to it. When you have 60-some hours of video on the disk, there's no way to watch it all before the disk degrades to an un-watchable state.

    --
    There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
  12. Two words: Blank Price by MikShapi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    DVD-R sales skyrocketed and everyone all of a sudden wound up getting a writer - the moment the blank price (usually calculated on a per-megabyte basis, though some people put VERY little bytes on each disk and therefore calculate the per-disk price) dropped below that of the departing CD-R technology.

    In my little corner of the world no other DVD*R, DVD/R or DVD^R was adopted. Why? because the blanks cost significantly more than el-cheapo DVD-R's.

    DVD-9 DL may already be there on the market, even the blanks may already be there, but if they don't compete in price with DVD-R, they may as well not be there.
    And same goes for blu-ray.
    - "Show me da money!"
    You want me to show you da moeny? Show us cheap blanks, I show you da money.

    --
    -
  13. not competition for sony... by andrewleung · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It looks like Sony's own Blu-ray recorder will now have some competition.
    no. it means that HD-DVD has one less argument against blu-ray. (i.e. sony only format)

    notice this is the initial stage for the format war... between blu-ray and HD-DVD. once the next gen format (blu-ray or HD-DVD) has been decided THEN the makers will start competing against each other...

    Notice now that for the beta vs. VHS war, it was pretty much sony vs. matsushita(panasonic) but now they are supporting each other. we have come a long way...

    each company in the blu-ray camp were showing off LOTS of players last year here in tokyo at the consumer electronics show... while HD-DVD were still just showing mockups... toshiba and NEC better play catchup fast... cuz the race has alrady started.