I have always said that the death of HD-DVD will be good for the prices of BluRay players and recorders. It sounds counterintuitive until logic enters the equation. HD-DVD and BluRay are not brand names or electronics manufacturers, they are formats. Losing a format means that more manufacturers will be focused on producing the same product. That product will inevitably become cheaper as manufacturers compete for greater sales volume. At the moment, prices are up, but give the HD-DVD manufacturers a little bit of time to retool their factories and you will see what happens. Trust me, I am never wrong about this sort of thing.

You can already see manufacturers that were hedging their bets or holding off really jump into the ring, which is precisely what Mitsubishi Electric has done. They have two new models of BluRay Recorder out in the wild. We have yet to confirm a price, but we are guessing that prices are still up there and probably not worth a plunge unless you feel the need to be an early adopter. The two new models are DVR-BZ200 with 500GB of internal HDD and the DVR-BZ100 with 250GB of internal HDD. Other than the HDD capacity, they share the same features. Without getting too carried away with the technical specifications I do want to point out one incredibly cool feature which is known as AVCREC, this allows you to record AVC to regular old DVDs, which will save you a bundle on media costs, especially if you are only recording TV shows. It will automatically remove commercials from your recordings, which these days is a necessity. Given all of the cool features, the iPhone-like LCD touchscreen remote is almost too much awesome for one machine.

No word on price yet, I will have to keep you appraised, at the moment this is Japan only, but I am sure that this will make it Stateside.

Source: Akihabara News, Mitsubishi Electric

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