Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd has announced that it will release a new line of Blu-ray optical disc recorders capable of recording more hours of full high definition content on a single disc than any other competing recorder to the Japanese market on November 1st.
The world's largest consumer electronics manufacturer additionally announced that it plans to release a line of conventional DVD recorders, which are capable of storing full high definition video on standard DVD discs – a world first.
The full high-definition (HD) recording format (also known as 1080p) offers a non-interlaced image resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, which is five times greater than that of a standard definition PAL DVD (Australian and European format), which has a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels.
The secret behind the players' exceptional recording capabilities is the inclusion of a new Large Scale Integration (LSI) chip for audio and video encoding. The chip is fabricated using a 45 Nanometre process – a first in a consumer product – and is able to compress an incoming digital broadcast signal by up to 75 per cent of its original size in real time without affecting the number of pixels.
Matsushita's new line of recorders, capable of storing up to 18 hours of 1080p video on a single-sided dual-layer 50 Gigabyte Blu-ray disc will come in three varieties.
The top end Blu-ray recorder will come with a one Terabyte internal hard drive, which can store up to 381 hours of 1080p content and is anticipated to retail at a price point of 300,000 yen ($2890). The mid and lower end recorders will come with 500 and 250 Gigabyte hard drives and will be respectively priced at 230,000 ($2200) yen and 180,000 yen ($1730).
The 1080p capable DVD format line of recorders will also come in 3 varieties. The top of the line model is comes with a 500 Gigabyte internal Hard drive and will retail for 130,000 yen ($1250). The mid range model comes with a 250 Gigabyte hard disk, has VHS recording capability and will also retail for 130,000 yen. The lower end model is essentially the same as the mid range model except with VHS functionality stripped out and is expected to retail at around 100,000 yen ($960).
The announcement of the 1080p enabled recorders was made at the CEATEC Japan 2007 electronics industry trade show in Chiba on October 2nd.
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