Finally... Toshiba announces 5.25" HD-DVD Recorder
 

Official PDF http://sdd.toshiba.com/localcache/82...0100000000.pdf

The glossy
http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Pat...00659c00003052

The DailyTech article on it (part of Anandtech)
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5589

Yeah!

Great news. The second wave of HD DVD and Blu-ray is upon us.

Yeah, by the time they get to the 4th or so, it might be usable/affordable :)

technically, we can 'burn' HD-DVD/BluRay on SD-DVDR's and DL's, correct? they just won't have the physical capacity to store 30GB-50GB like the real thing and probably little to no copy protection, no?

That should be true. The only implementations I have seen are HD-DVD though. The Toshiba player is supposed to play them and I have seen comments on experiments at stores. Blu-Ray should, but don't know if I have seen anyone saying they did it. But then again, I plan to support HD-DVD and just sort of ignore Blu-Ray detailed information.

I don't think we can realistically afford to ignore either format if customers express interest in both. So far I've had one request for Blu-ray delivery and none for HD-DVD, for what that's worth. Availability of HD movies appears to be evenly split based on what's available at Amazon.com.

OEM only, that's weird... Also, I understand that it's 1st Gen, but only 1x recording? How long is that for a full HD-DVD?

I think it is around 55 minutes for 30GB.

I guess that's not too bad. I was thinking 3x longer than that. I wonder when duplicators with 10 of these will show up.

What is the price/ availability of blank HD medium?
I would also have to ask what sizes are available. In the case of SD-DVD we all know that 4.7gb disks have been cheap and widely available, with DL disks costing well more than there double storage would indicate and only recently available. How will this situation play out in the HD world? I assume we will get single layer blanks and as always the DL disks will arrive sometime down the road at an even greater cost. Of course studio's will put their releases on DL to hamper copying.
At this point I am thinking burning 720p content on DL DVD (9gb) to be HD-DVD or Blue-ray compatible, would be a great cost saver, and in no way really limit basic content. Of course this was already done with the first HD titles(T2, shrek, shrek 2 ect..), but I think were encoded WMV so only watchable on a PC. If blue-ray cannot read DL-DVD encoded in HD, then screw them.

I saw both media available at Fry's. The HD-DVD disc was $20. I think it was only single layer. That was more than a month ago.

Microcenter has three brands priced at $13.99, $14.99 and $21.99 (all 15G single layer).

Newegg.com has one for $8.99 (shipping is pricey at $5 for one but gets reasonable as quantities go up).