Toshiba introducing HD-DVD recorder
 

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060622/japan..._dvd.html?.v=4

Available in Japan on July 15 for about $3,500, no US release date announced yet.

The recorders are finally out, woohoo!

So let's see... at a 50% annual depreciation rate, I should be able to afford this in five years. Not bad!

This recorder is Japan only and has the built in broadcast tuners and a TB of HDD space.

I hope they plan on just giving us a recorder for North America and the 1080p support.

The internal SATA HD-DVD rewritable drive (writes DVD+/-R/RW|DL formats and CDs too) should start shipping both in the USA and Japan in August/September. Retail is supposed to be < $1000. So, we could always assemble a media center PC with DVR functions and an internal drive for less than one of these other recorders.

Anyway, the HD-DVD recorder will be < $2000 when it hits stores in the USA and within 2 years, they'll be < $300. Samsung already announced their BluRay player/recorder for MSRP $2200 and it should start shipping by the end of the year. Sony's internal IDE/SATA BluRay drives for computers ship next month along with the slimline for notebooks that will be in the new VAIO and most likely in the next round of MacBooks as well as notebooks from Dell.

...Sony also (in the face of industry pressure) dropped their licensing restrictions on BD in units with competing formats. So Samsung, LG and others are now openly talking about universal BD, HDDVD, DVD, CD players again. Maybe we'll see one early next year (hopefully).