Sony Brings the Blu-Ray & Hard Drive-Based DVR

Way back in December of 2003, my dad bought my wife and I a DVR. It was a Sony and it was a DVD-based DVR and only recorded to DVD. It had a flaw when it came to cutting out commercials (I had been slicing out TV ads on VHS since the 1980s). If memory serves, it wouldn't actually let you cut out the commercials. Even when recording onto an RW disk, I couldn't transfer the video onto my Mac to then cut out the commercials. So, I asked my dad if he'd mind if I exchanged the Sony for a DVR with a bit more flexibility. He said it was fine and anticipated it by giving me the receipt along with the DVR in the first place.



At my local Good Guys electronics store (now a Guitar Center) I found a Panasonic that looked like it was everything I had ever wanted in a DVR--almost. It was the DMR-E80H and it came with an 80 gig hard drive (that Sony had *no* hard drive at all) and allowed for easy commercial-removal. The only draw back to the E80H has been that the only rewritable disk it can use is a DVD-RAM. Sadly, they're not widely compatible with DVD drives on computers, so I haven't done that much RAM burning. However, when my mom decided to look into a DVR, she asked me for my advice. I told her to look for something like my Panasonic.



Of course, there was a catch--Panasonic didn't seem to make mine anymore.



I knew my sister-in-law, Lisa (http://olrr.net/ ), had bought a descendant of the E80H, but that was the only other Panasonic DVR like mine that I was aware of. I visited a couple different Best Buy stores and checked out one of the three Fry's Electronics within driving distance of my apartment, here in LA--all with no luck finding anything even remotely resembling my E80H. Finally, I just asked a Best Buy employee if they carried anything like my Panasonic--I even described the exact features:



Big hard drive (for the time)

burns to DVD

records to the hard drive or a DVD



Not much to ask from electronics makers you would think.



The BB employee replied saying that cable and minidish companies are doing deals with electronics companies to force consumers to only get DVRs when you subscribe to cable or minidish companies. Highly lame, in my mind, but it explained why my beautiful E80H had sparse offspring.



Then, a couple weeks back, I stumbled across an April 8, 2008 post at UberGizmo.com talking about Sony's Blu-ray-DVD/hard-drive-based DVRs (http://www.ubergizmo.com/…rders.html ). Knowing devices like these are out there makes me so happy. Here's a bit from the Ubergizmo post:



"Sony certainly aims to solidify its place in the living room by launching a new BDZ series of Blu-ray recorders, with the A70 and high-end T90 being capable of picking up unprotected HDTV feeds, relying on AVC (H.264) encoding in order to record shows for future viewing on their respective 320GB and 500GB hard drives. You can choose to record videos to Blu-ray directly if the need arises, and it can also convert videos straight into portable-friendly formats. Sony PSP and other H.264-capable player owners, are you listening yet?"



Keeeryst, am I listening or WHAT!!



WANT IT.



Sadly, the A70 and its high-end cousin the T90 will drop April 30 but only in Japan and prices *start* at $1600 . When I head over to Nippon, I'm going to have to find a job fast so I can pick up one of these bad boys. .5TB HDs with transfers to PSP??



DEWD.



Oh and the other theory I had, thanks to this new line of BD and HD-based DVRs coming out is that perhaps DVR-makers wanted to hold off introducing any new DVR models to see which next-gen DVD format would win the format wars. Not that Blu-ray will be around long as a format, but soon BDs will be as cheep as SD DVDs and will function as throw-away media, like current DVD-Rs do.
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