Sony launches Blu-ray, DVR hybrid players

Sony this morning showed increased confidence in Blu-ray by launching its new BDZ series of Blu-ray recorders. The A70 and top-end T90 both pick up unprotected HDTV feeds and use AVC (H.264) encoding to record shows for posterity to their respective 320GB and 500GB hard drives. The choice of format not only allows the devices to record videos directly to Blu-ray but also allows converting videos directly to portable-friendly formats: videos can be resized to fit on either a PSP or another H.264-capable player, such as Sony's own Walkman lineup or some NTT DoCoMo cellphones.

Both recorders include both analog and digital TV tuners, Sony's Room Link for sharing information between devices on a network, and output via HDMI as well as D4 (Japan's component equivalent), S-video, and RCA. Aside from hard drive capacity, the T90 improves on video quality with optimizations for sports and adds 24 frames per second native output for movies. The two ship on April 30th in Japan and will start from the equivalent of $1,664. Sony hasn't yet announced plans for Blu-ray DVR recorders in North America. [via Impress]

Filed under: gadgets
Other story tags: sony, blu-ray, PSP, walkman