Panasonic rolls out Blu-ray trio

Philip Wong | Oct 11, 2007

Panasonic has caught up with its Japanese compatriot Sharp by introducing three Blu-ray and hard drive combo Hi-vision recorders. At the top of the echelon is a 1TB DMR-BW900 capable of recording up to a whopping 381 hours of HD broadcasts. To enable this feat, the new entries are all equipped with advanced MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 in addition to the usual MPEG-2 encoder. The former is the same compression technology found in Blu-ray and HD-DVD products.

Besides a pair of hi-def broadcast tuners, there are HDMI version 1.3 Deep Color and Blu-ray interactivity supports. The higher-end DMR-BW900 and 500GB DMR-BW800 also output judder-free 1080p24 which put both on par with full-featured Blu-ray players in the market. These, together the 250GB DMR-BW700, will be launched in Japan from November 1. There's no news of an Asia launch.

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