Panasonic has unveiled three new Blu-ray Disc recorders at the At the Ceatec show in Japan going by this PC World report. Unlike other current Blu-ray recorders that simply capture the transmitted MPEG2 digital stream, these models feature real-time conversion to the more efficient MPEG4 AVC compression, thus allowing up to 18 hours to be stored on a 50GB Blu-ray disc compared with the usual 4 hours with direct MPEG2 recording. This is the result of recent chip development that allows real-time high definition MPEG2 to AVC compression.
The DMR-BW900 features a 1TB hard disk, which will allow between 160 and 381 hours of HD recording using the AVC codec or 127 hours without any recompression. Recordings made to hard disk can be transferred at up to 4x speed to a Blu-ray recordable disc. The DMR-BW800 and DMR-BW700 have hard disk capacities of 500GB and 250GB respectively.
All three models will go on sale in Japan on November 1st; however, Panasonic has no immediate plans to make them available overseas. The DMR-BW700, DMR-BW800 and DMR-BW900 models will be priced at 300,000 (~US$2,600), 230,000 (~US$2,000) and 180,000 (~US$1,550) Yen respectively.
