Panasonic Blu-ray Disc recorder ready to hit the market

but how many more months before it crosses over to the US, and whats the starting price? my guess is not for a while, and probably pretty expensive...let alone the blu-ray media

it all sounds good for the japanese. But im in australia and it will take a while to come out. What is the price and when will it be avalible?

I think it is going to be around $50 for a single sided 25Gb disc when it will be released in the US or UK, and the speeds of writing to this media will be slow at first. My gues is a couple of years before it is like the media we use today...

There is no rush needed for Blu-ray. At this time we really have all that is necessary. What would I do with 25-30Gb discs? Transfer 4-5 movies to one disc. Nice, but how often would I need that? Blu-ray will become useful when there are High-Def movies available on the market. It is expected that a HD movie will take 22-25 Gb. When you can go to your local BestBuy/Walmart to buy this week's movie release in HD or you want to buy a 25Gb video game released on Blu-ray, then we'll clamor for Blu-ray burners. As HD movies would probably to to the regular DVD what DVD did to VHS, I don't expect that multimedia businesses are in a hurry yet to switch over to Blu-ray. THIS "cash cow" still has plenty of life in her. In addition to that, these companies are feverishly trying to figure out a way to prevent us from being able to copy HD back-ups with Blu-ray. They are learning a lot from the DVD experiment. They know they will have to do a lot better. They are not quite ready.

I was just about to ask that same question about these new burners. What kind of DRM will be incorporated into them? Autoshutdown when Macrovision is detected? Will the damn thing simply melt like a mission impossible tape recorder? Who knows but you can bet your rear end the MPAA will force the issue with their bought and paid for Congress..

I think blu-ray is especialy good for HD backup; with B/R media you can burn your HD content to a few CDs and you're done, which is very nice.

they need RWs so people that need to can erase them, those will probably be $50-75 a pop though. Also, Ritek probably won't get involved for about a year or so after its release.