Even if we live in the age of high-definition television and the DVD has been around for a very long time, the truth of the matter is that there are still quite a lot of people out there who are not willing to give up on their collection of old VHS tapes just yet. And for this particular (but seemingly, quite popular) category of users, the Panasonic company has just launched the DIGA DMR-BR360V, a hybrid standalone recorder/player that incorporates both a Blu-ray optical unit AND a VHS slot.

However, it seems that including both of the aforementioned playback options in a single device simply wasn't enough for Panasonic engineers. For this reason, the combo player also packs a 320 GB HDD, which can be presumably used to store the contents of VHS tapes (after ripping and prior to writing them onto BD discs) or the video recorded from the product's digital and analog TV tuners and encoded by DIGA's second generation MPEG-4 AVC H.264 encoder chips.

As far as connectivity details go, the DIGA DMR-BR360V is equipped with pretty much anything you might ask of it, including here analog and HDMI interfaces, as well as a USB port, an SD card slot and an Ethernet connector, which will be used to access acTVila, a content download service created by several Japanese companies. Plus, the player's got the Viera Link built-in, which means that it will work right out of the box with most of Panasonic's HDTVs currently available on the market.

As for the pricing and availability... well, things get a bit tricky here. Thus, the hybrid device from Panasonic will be available, starting with October 1st, solely in Japan, and will retail for an estimated price of around 1,500 US dollars. However, since I'm pretty sure that there are lots of VHS owners around the world, this particular model could actually prove to be quite successful on other markets as well.


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