According to Sony, the new Blu-ray recorders will hit shelves in Japan on Nov. 8. The company said it is considering offering the new recorders in Europe, but set no time frame for their release there.
Sony said that the new recorders will be capable of writing up to 16 hours of high-def content on a dual-layer 50GB Blu-ray disc. The 500GB hard drive-equipped recorder will sell for approximately $1,750 — right around the same price that Sony rival Toshiba charges for its HD-DVD recorder.
Katsumi Ihara, executive deputy president for Sony, said that the rapidly developing market for high-def content drove the decision to release the recorders this year.
“With high-definition TVs spreading rapidly and more digital cameras and camcorders are becoming HD-ready, time is ripe for household recorders to move onto a next generation,” Ihara said at a press conference this week. “We intend to make all our recorders in the domestic [Japanese] market Blu-ray compatible.”
Sony’s previously released disc recorders were unable to record to a dual-layer disc, greatly reducing their usefulness where file size intensive high-def content was concerned.
In its ongoing "format war" with Toshiba and its partners in HD-DVD products, Sony has seen both wins and losses in recent months. In June, the massive American movie store chain Blockbuster threw in behind the Blu-ray format, but that victory was offset by Viacom (along with its subsidiaries Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks Animation) signing a deal in August to distribute its high-def content in HD-DVD exclusively for the next 18 months.
Sony believed it had an ace in the hole with its Playstation 3 gaming console, which is Blu-ray equipped, but sluggish sales of the console have dashed hopes that Sony’s gaming platform would drive significant sales of Blu-ray discs.