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

Goody!

[FrYGuY101]

Another toy that I can't afford!

Re:Goody!

[OECD]

Another toy that I can't afford!

Why would you want a blurry recorder? (Note to self: apply to Panasonic's marketing department. They're bound to have an opening soon.)

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

So long, tape drive!

[PeterPumpkin]

I wonder if there's gonna be a Knoppix version that takes advantage of this...

/*cue old time movie dream scene harp*/

"All new Knoppix 6.0! Every Linux distribution can now be tested on a bootable live CD! :D

Re:So long, tape drive!

[QuantumRiff]

Do you really want to download that ISO on even a T-1 Line? have bittorrent swamp your connection for a month?

Ouch... Maybe they'd have a cheapbytes disk...

Re:So long, tape drive!

[Errtu76]

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

Re:So long, tape drive!

[NanoGator]

"I wonder if there's gonna be a Knoppix version that takes advantage of this..."

Screw Knoppix, we'll finally be able to get Redhat down to one disc!!

Great for independent film makers

[gphinch]

So now indie film makers can record super-high-res bad acting, tired dialogue, and shoddy set production. Joy!

Not good enough

[SteroidMan]

I mean I still can't watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy directors cut without swapping discs so whats the point!

Backup solution

[Bob McCown]

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?

Re:Backup solution

[arth1]

Hmm, let's consider:

Backup method 1:
Lots of data, burned to several blueRAY DVDs. Backup takes hours, you have to swap, and using your system for other things while burning is likely to produce coasters. Price: $500 plus for a burner, plus an unknown amount for the media. The backups take up very little room, but must be treated as gentle you treat your cornea.

Backup method 2:
A cheap/old PC, equipped with a couple of big hard drives, hooked up through ethernet. Backup is reasonably fast, and you don't have to swap. I.e. you can do nightly backups without human intervention, and keep multiple levels of backup.
The backup media can take quite a bit of punishment, and at $.50 per gigabyte, even be mirrored for extra safety.

Unless you need to ship the things through mail or store them in tiny safe deposit boxes, I see no reason for using DVDs, blu-ray or otherwise, for data storage.

YMMV,
--
*Art

Re:Backup solution

[aardvarkjoe]

Backup method 3:
Lots of data, the whole of the aforementioned 40 gig disk burned to a single Blu-ray disc. Backup takes a couple hours, but no big deal, as you kick it off before you go to bed. Price: $30 after rebate from Office Max for the cheap no-name burner, plus a couple bucks a disc. At pennies per gigabyte, you can make a hundred copies of your data and never worry about what happens if your dog sparky manages to chew on them. Time until this is feasible: about a year after the next-generation storage technology is released.

Crap

[WormholeFiend]

Does that mean I'll have to buy another set of Star Wars DVDs, The Blue Ray Edition?

I hope this time Han shoots first.

Come on.

[brewin]

They went from red laser to blue-ray. Why don't they just skip straight to gamma-ray DVDs? Sure, you'd have to wear a radiation suit to watch Return of the King, but that's a small price to pay for ultra-high capacity, right?

Re:Come on.

[Jugalator]

Why don't they just skip straight to gamma-ray DVDs? Sure, you'd have to wear a radiation suit to watch Return of the King, but that's a small price to pay for ultra-high capacity, right?

Gamma rays you say?

But if I skip the suit, I'll become the incredible Hulk when I hear about Darl McBride!

I think that sounds much more cool than staying like a sad geek posting on Slashdot when hearing about the same McBride.

Blue Laser

[jedi-monkey]

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.

Re:Blue Laser

[Bi()hazard]

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.

Big enough to be useful, finally.

[EvilNight]

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...

Re:Big enough to be useful, finally.

[Aardpig]

tapes were just too expensive and unreliable (and slow).

Expensive, sure, but unreliable? A decent Digital Linear Tape drive is a far superior backup solution to optical disks -- plenty of capacity, and the storage medium doesn't have the annoying habit of rusting or decaying as it sits on the shelf. The same can't be said of CDs and DVDs...

Of course, for real reliability, there is only one proven solution. Clay tablets. We've got those going back to the dawn of civilization; but, tellingly, there are no CDs from before the 1980s. Now if only someone would make a clay jukebox...

Re:Big enough to be useful, finally.

[EvilNight]

Let's see you carry a copy offsite!

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)...

Nice Pricing Scheme

[grunt107]

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!!!)

Re:Nice Pricing Scheme

[NanoGator]

"I would not think that current DVD owners would burn multiple movies into 1 DVD backup."

Those of us that have entire seasons of Television shows might be interested. Depending on how easy it is to do, yadda yadda yadda. (Transcoding sucks!)

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.

Re:Reliable?

[stratjakt]

DVD media is actually less sensitive, because it has much more robust error correction built in. The players are more sensitive, because they use lasers that put out less light at higher frequencies.

Since the principle is bounce the light off the disk, and if it comes back it's a 1, the less light the laser emits the crappier it works. But if you simply turn up the juice you run the risk of creating light in the wrong spectrum.

In the end, most players are just cheap shit and thats where the problems come from. I've put DVD's into my trusty Panasonic slot-loading drive that look like they've had a belt-sander taken to them.

Most people with these complaints have cheapo compusa-branded drives in their computer and a $20 Apex set-top from Wal-mart. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's the equipment that's at fault.

As of today 120 gb of photographs....

[purduephotog]

... 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)

Re:As of today 120 gb of photographs....

[Capt'n Hector]

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?

Re:As of today 120 gb of photographs....

[argStyopa]

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.


Not to be contentious, but these drives are going to start at what, $700-$800 for at least the first year they're out? Media's probably going to be a minimum $6-$10 per disc for the short to medium term.

When I see that USB drives are about $0.50/gig, I wouldn't really have a problem with buying hard drives for backup devices, and swapping them out when I need the images. You can store a LOT of pictures before you start to reach the price point of your blue-ray burner, and (I don't know how compatible blue ray dvd's are with red-ray tech) the images remain a lot more universally portable.

Re:As of today 120 gb of photographs....

[Ironica]

So why don't you buy a few 200 gb hard drives?

Maybe because...

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.

He already does, but would like a better option?

Excellent - back to sneakernet!

[Dr. Zowie]

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.

Re:50 GB

[Anonymous Writer]

It's not the size that matters... it's how you use it

Re:Dual sided Dual layered

[Anonymous Coward]

Double sided double density! rock on!

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.

How robust is the media?

[Capt'n Hector]

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?

Sony Mediascape

[Doc Ruby]

Look for Sony to complete it's "merger" with BMG, throw the MGM movie library on the pile, and issue HDVDs (HDTV DVDs) for loading onto your Media Vaio, and taking with you on your PS-ultra, docking in your car for those long drives to Sony IMAX. Trailer spam to your Sony smartphone!

... not that they're supported by the DVD Forum :(

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:which one to buy?

[stratjakt]

A DVD-+R is under 100 bucks. I predict it'll be around 50 by the end of the year. Blanks are coming wayy down in price, almost on parity with CD-R (well, on parity with CD-R if you go gig for gig cost)

So just frickin buy one. Unless you need 50 gigs per disc, and are willing to pay the crazy prices for the drives and media.

In a couple years, when blu-ray is the $100 dollar solution with uber-cheap media, buy one of those.

If $100 dollars is too rich for your blood, you need another hobby.

Stupid Question

[Erwos]

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

-Erwos

Re:Stupid Question

[Jugalator]

Short answer:

Only drives specifically designed to support Blu-Ray discs can play them.

Long answer:

Blu-Ray discs are just "recordable discs", and not DVD discs, since they don't adhere to the DVD specification. HD-DVD discs do on the other hand, and I think they were designed with more backwards compatibility in mind. It might be possible to use tricks on those, like storing "DVD" information in one layer that's backwards compatible and "HD-DVD" in another. Then your "old" DVD player could "see" the DVD information and not even know it's reading from a HD-DVD disc. That's speculation though, but I think there might at least be a small chance things could work with HD-DVD's.

Open, yeah!

[aka-ed]

The DMR-E700BD...will be put on the Japanese market on an open-price basis on July 31

Open price? I don't suppose that's free as in beer?

Re:FINALLY

[kpansky]

You only hav 50 gigs of porn? I have a beowulf cluster of beowulf clusers of RAID 0+1 disks in order to store all of mine -- and Im about ready to upgrade.

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.

Re:... not that they're supported by the DVD Forum

[stratjakt]

the salesman said that DVD+R isn't the standard, and while DVD-R was supported on basically all DVD players

The salesman was full of shit. A salesman told me the opposite.

They're both standard. Some units work well with one, some with the other, some with neither (older ones).

The only "right" answer is to stick with what works, which has been DVD-R for me too (mostly because thats what my PS2 and XBOX like).

Linux on one disk

[WormholeFiend]

And after we get Linux on one disk, once each blu-ray DVDr becomes cheap enough, what's to stop us from mailing them all over the place, AOL-style?

At least...

[Apocalypse111]

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.

Great, more retail store shelf clutter...

[dpbsmith]

One more media category that Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, etc. will need to find room for on their shelves, in among the DVD+RW and the DVD-R and the Music CD-Rs and the Data CD-RW's and the Type 4 DVD-RAM and the Type 2 DVD-RAM and the Type 1 DVD-RAM and the "printable-but-not-by-inkjet" DVD's and the "inkjet-printable" DVD's.

I wonder what category of media they will kick out in order to make room for it? And what devices will start to become effectively orphaned as once-easily-obtained media become increasingly hard to find?

Two words: Blank Price

[MikShapi]

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.

Re:Can't Wait!

[Mycroft_VIII]

Gah you shoulda waited for the collectors edition.
running time 17d 12h 43m, And it comes with really cool bookends and a $10 gift certificate to a local pizza delivery chain.
All for a just $20 more than your $80 wannabee version!

Mycroft

Blu-ray Knoppix

[rice_burners_suck]

Next thing you know, Knoppix will fit on one of these, with about 120 gigs of programs, development environments, complete source code, and a few free (libre) movies, songs, photos, clipart, and other media to boot... And it will only take a month to download!

GaN GaN GaN

[grrrl]

another example of the fabulousness of gallium nitride (GaN) and its cousins in the III-nitride semiconductor material system

gallium/aluminium/indium nitride (and their alloys) are the semiconductors that bring to you the blue/violet lasers being used to read/write the blu-ray discs

the wavelength of blue light is smaller than of red (red lasers are currently used for dvd/cd drives) and hence it has a finer resolution - that means, more data on the same size disc

only a few years ago gallium nitride technology was in its infancy - now, largely thanx to the hard work of Shuji Nakamura blue LEDs and lasers are making it into home electronics around the world! it really is an amazing to feat to have overcome the difficulties of developing this material into the fantastic devices today (see Shuji's book "The Blue Laser Diode: GaN Based Light Emitters and Lasers", 1997, for background into their development)

sure, most of us care little about how the technology gets to us, and bitch about the implementation - but let us think for a moment on the fact that we have it at all (and sure its expensive but a lot more money has gone into getting it to us)!

ok, so i'm a gan researcher and a little biased :P but at the end of the day as a geek i think blu-ray dvds are very very cool and i want to have them in my house ;)

not competition for sony...

[andrewleung]

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.