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

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

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!

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?

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...

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.

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.

... 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.