Sony may wish they'd been first with their Blu-ray hard disc recording solution but that accolade seems to be going to Panasonic, who have announced that Japan will be getting their 4x speed recorder in mid-November.
The DIGA DMR-BW200 and DMR-BR100 models can record high definition content onto Blu-ray rewritable discs at up to four times speed from the built in hard disc drive, and they'll also allow recording onto dual-layer 50Gb discs - something Sony isn't yet offering.
Panasonic are definitely looking the more attractive of the early players so far. As if that's not enough, the two models come with either 200Gb or a whopping 500Gb of hard disc space - but bearing in mind that HD content can take up to 8 times the space of SD recordings, that's not a luxury but an essential.
The upper-end DMR-BW200 has a whopping 7 TV tuners - 2 each for terrestrial, BS and 110-degree CS digital broadcasts, and one analogue tuner. No, I don't know what those all are and it will be interesting to see how these (presumably) Japanese standards translate when and if a model with this much clout makes it over to Europe. I like the idea of multiple tuners. The machine will be able to record two of these signals at once, either both to the HDD or one to the HD and one to the disc.
The new DIGAs' image processing engines include Panasonic's own HD Optimizer that automatically detects and suppresses digital noise. It also handles down-conversion of HD signals to SD for storage on regular DVDs, and upconversion of SD content to a HD TV over HDMI.
Though I haven't seen a price for these models yet, they do on first inspection seem to outperform Sony's first offering on features and availability. Are Sony kicking themselves for not being first to market with their own high-def creation?
It will be interesting to see when and how the US and European markets are cracked open by Blu-ray manufacturers.
From: Sony to double BRAVIA LCD TV production for growing European demand