Toshiba ships first notebooks with HD DVD rewriters
updated 08:45 am EST, Mon December 17, 2007
Toshiba Qosmio HD DVD-RW
In a late addition to its PC range, Toshiba on Monday revealed its first-ever portables to support HD DVD re-recording. New versions of the 15.4-inch Qosmio F40 and the 17-inch G40 each sport HD DVD-RW drives that allow them to be used hundreds or thousands of times for HD DVD content, such as large data backups or for videos. An update in February will allow either of the systems to burn copies of unprotected HDTV broadcasts pulled from their built-in digital TV tuners, the company adds.
The F40 with the HD DVD-RW option starts at a rough price of $2,649 in Japan with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of memory, a 200GB hard drive, and a 256MB GeForce 8600M GT to help offload the work of decoding HD video from the main processor. Moving to the $3,532 G40 expands the screen and boosts the processor to 2.2GHz, adds a second 200GB drive, and brings dual digital tuners for simultaneous recording and playback of live TV. Both systems come with HDMI audio/video output and should ship by December 21st in their home country, pointing to a US release of one or both systems in early 2008. [via Impress]
