To service Japan’s serial recording consumers, Sony unveiled four new Blu-ray disc recorders with high capacity HDD.

The top-of-the-line unit – the BDZ-X90 – will have a 500GB hard drive. The other models are the BDZ-L70 and the BDZ-T70, which each have 320GB of internal storage. The smallest of the line is the BDZ-T50, with a 250GB.

Unlike last year’s models, the new line will support dual-layer 50GB BD discs. A dual-layer BD disc holds just over four hours of HDTV when the over-the-air MPEG2 stream is recorded directly to the disc. By transcoding this stream to MPEG4 AVC up to 16 hours of high definition material can be put onto the same disc.

The new models all feature 1080/24p and lossless HD audio output, and all but the T50 offer dual digital tuners and an analog tuner with the ability to record two shows at once. The high-end X90 supports Deep Color and the X90 and L70 both support the "Sony Room Link" DLNA-based function for streaming content around a home network.

The high-end X90 model will cost around ¥200,000 (€1,250), which is approximately the same as Toshiba's high-end HD DVD recorder and the first HD disc recorder on the market, the RD-A1. The L70 model will cost about ¥180,000 and the T70 and T50 will have a pricetag of ¥160,000 and ¥140,000 respectively.

Unlike in the US and Europe where DVD recorders account for 10-15% of total DVD households, DVD recorders – with high capacity hard disk drives – are in 60% of Japanese DVD homes. The units are used extensively to record off-the-air terrestrial and satellite TV programmes, including increasingly the “Hi-Vision” HDTV satellite services. Rather than destined for Blu-ray movie playback, the Blu-ray-equipped HDDs recorders are thus primarily targeted to Hi-Vision recordings, requiring large disc capacity.

At a news conference, Sony's Katsumi Ihara said the company is considering releasing the new Blu-ray recorders in Europe, but no launch dates have been set. The company currently does not have plans to offer the Blu-ray recorders to the North American market.

In separate developments, Sony has reiterated its commitment to Blu-ray Disc by planning to finish with standard DVDand use the high-definition video disc format in all future digital video recorders in Japan, according to a recent company statement.

Story filed 17.09.07