Panasonic to release consumer DVD video recorder

From...

by Ashlee Vance

(IDG) -- Panasonic Consumer Electronics Monday released plans to deliver the first consumer DVD (digital versatile disk) video recorder at a price nearing $4,000.

Linking home computing and home entertainment, Panasonic plans to release both its DMR-E10 DVD recorder and a removable DVD-RAM disk into retail channels later this month. The disk, priced at $34.99, is compatible with audio/video and personal computing applications.

One advantage of the DVD-RAM disk over the clunky VCR cassette is the ability for users to rewrite content thousands of times without losing integrity on either the video or the audio side of the disk. Additionally, they can access scenes from the latest home movie instantly without rewinding or fast-forwarding. The disk also offers the standard advantages of a digital medium, including better picture quality, large amounts of storage and clear audio.

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While this next step in home recording was inevitable, few consumers would seem likely to want to pay the heavy price tag of both the recorder and the disk.

Jay Srivatsa, senior analyst at Dataquest, said that the two Panasonic products do not offer enough appeal for the average consumer to find the extra technology attractive at its current cost. "It's not meant to be a consumer product at all at this time," Srivatsa said. "Panasonic just wants to put a stake in the ground."

He cited the fact that only a small percentage of consumers could afford these products and the technology does little to convince a user of the inadequacy of current products. He believes that it will take three to four years before video recorder DVD technology is available at a price range that makes it worthwhile for mass consumption.

"It will have to be at least less than $500 to be considered a consumer product," Srivatsa said, referring to the price of the recorder.

He also added that Hollywood will be watching the advancement of this technology carefully. With these types of products, movie buffs could do anything from making a digital copy of the latest film at the local cinema to reproducing the movie at a quicker pace and higher quality than ever before.

Panasonic uses hybrid VBR (variable bit rate) technology to control the MPEG-2 compression ratio in real time. Uniting the real-time VBR encoding technology with visibility modulation techniques allows for longer recording time and higher quality images, the company said in a statement.

The new recorder will give users a choice of a bit rate that suits his or her needs, ranging from 60 to 240 minutes of recording time, Panasonic claims. In addition, the vendor said that the quality of original analog images may improve upon transferring them to the digital medium.

Other bells and whistles of the recorder include the ability to mark up to 999 scenes as thumbnail images that can be accessed instantly. An input TBC (time base corrector) can also remove shaking from an original.

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Panasonic
Dataquest

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