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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."
Another toy that I can't afford!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Unknown host pong.
I wonder if there's gonna be a Knoppix version that takes advantage of this...
/*cue old time movie dream scene harp*/
:D
"All new Knoppix 6.0! Every Linux distribution can now be tested on a bootable live CD!
So now indie film makers can record super-high-res bad acting, tired dialogue, and shoddy set production. Joy!
in bed.
I mean I still can't watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy directors cut without swapping discs so whats the point!
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.
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?
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.
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)...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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!!!)
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
I am a speak english. Do you not? - Saroto
... exist on my HD.
;) 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.
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
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)
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.
It's not the size that matters... it's how you use it
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.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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?
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!
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
--Kevin
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.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
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?
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?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
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.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?