Panasonic is releasing the first Blu-ray Recorder outside Japan, in Australia, hitting store’s shelves later June. The Panasonic DMR-BW500 apparently is very similar to the Panasonic DMP-BD30, which is a profile 1.1 player already released here in the US but of course without the recorder addition. The player is selling in Australia for AU$2,299! That is in Australian Dollars… Ouch! Still, didn’t help much… but I guess you have to pay the price of new technology.

On top of being a Full HD, 24p Blu-ray player, this model can record up to six hours and 40 minutes of Full HD content to a 50GB BD disc. More impressively, it has a 500GB hard drive built in, along with twin HD TV tuners, 7-day EPG support, HDMI v1.3, 1080p upconversion with HDMI (for DVD playback) and support for all the latest audio codecs, including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. There’s also a USB port and an SD card slot for JPG, MP3 and AVC-HD files. The unit does not have decoders built-in for the new Blu-ray audio standards, but it can deliver the sound in ‘bitstream’ format over HDMI to any of the several new home theater receivers that can decode these.

Panasonic Australia’s Director for Consumer Electronics Group, Paul Reid said, “Panasonic has led the way in home entertainment products and continues to bring innovation to the market with Australia’s first Blu-ray Recorder for the living room. This product is a significant breakthrough for Blu-ray and sets the standard in Full High Definition recording. With a twin High Definition Tuner and 500 GB Hard Disk Drive it is the ideal one-box solution for any home.”

Thomas Bartlett from www.gadgetguy.com.au did a pretty good and thorough review of this new recorder. To sum it up he absolutely loved it! Now, when will we get this type of “toy” in the US? This is crazy and not fair.

The reason we haven’t got Blu-ray recorders in the Uncle Sam’s land probably has to do with our regulatory agencies and pressure from the big Networks such as: NBC, ABC, CBS and all the letters of the alphabet… The networks and their studios like to sell their television series season box sets and of course wouldn’t want you to be able to record it and burn it yourself… Maybe when the FCC (Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcastings in the US) allows broadcasts with content protection flags we may start seeing Blu-ray recorders arrive.

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Via: www.gadgetguy.com.au

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