Panasonic Rolls Out Three New High-End Blu-Ray Recorders/Burners

It would seem that, even if the final outcome of the next-gen format war is still far away, an increasingly higher number of manufacturers are starting to give their products the Blu-ray treatment, fitting such drives to their previous DVD-only devices. Thus, after Blu-ray's parent, Sony, announced a while back the launch of complete series of Blu-ray enabled DVRs (digital video recorders), the people over at Panasonic came up with their own offering of this type, namely the DIGA BW700, BW800 and BW900, presented at the CEATEC Expo from Japan.

The most important feature provided by the DIGA recorders is, quite obviously, the presence of the 4X Blu-ray drives, which can be used for recording TV programs or other multimedia content either directly from the devices' built-in TV tuners or from their built-in HDDs. Furthermore, all of the aforementioned drives make use of the AVC (H.264) video format, which allows for larger storage capacities. Thus, a single Blu-ray disc (the 50 GB version) can hold up to 18 hours of recording.

However, as mentioned earlier, these things don't rely solely on the BD discs for storage purposes, as each of the three recorders comes packed with its own HDD, providing very large capacities for saving the users' data and multimedia content: 250 GB in the case of the DIGA BW700, 500 GB in the case of the BW800 and a whopping 1 TB for the BW900. Moreover, each of the DVRs feature an SD card slot, which can be used either for playing both AAC and JPEG files directly from the card but also for transferring video clips or photos to the HDD.

Another major difference between the three new DIGAs is represented by the connectivity and options. Thus, while the BW700 features only D4 and HDMI inputs, plus a single FireWire input and support for 1080i playback, the next models (BW800 and BW900) provide support for 1080p playback, 2 x FireWire inputs and a coaxial audio out interface.

Obviously, taking into account their advanced features, these things are by no means cheap. Hence, when these things hit the shelves in Japan in November, the BW700 will sell for around 1550 US dollars, the BW800 for around 1990 US dollars, while the BW for a bank-account breaking 2600 US dollars.

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .