Toshiba RD-A1 HD-DVD Recorder
Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the world’s first high-definition optical disc recorder based on the HD DVD format. This baby — equipped with an unbelievable 1TB hard drive — went on sale this morning in Tokyo with a heart-stopping price tag of Â¥398,000, or about US$3,400. Yes, cutting edge technology doesn’t come cheap.
The initial launch was to be held a full two weeks before the sun came up this morning, but was postponed as manufacturing difficulties meant that Toshiba might not be able to fulfil the public’s lust for everything state-of-the-art.
As the world’s first consumer-oriented HD DVD player capable of writing to next-generation recordable media, RegHardware states that its stunningly huge hard disk storage is sufficient for 130 hours of HD content and comes with “digital terrestrial and satellite tuners, along with an analogue tuner for back-up and a wide array of digital and analogue video and audio inputs and outputs, including HDMI”. A network port is also included. The player reads all the usual formats, but will only write to DVD-R/RW/RAM, including their dual-layer versions.
Besides it heavy retail price, other reasons that might steer buyers away from the queue line would be its bulky package (the machine records 15.2kg on the scales and measures 45.7 x 40.8 x 15.9cm) and the fact that it will only support MPEG 2-encoded content, not the preferred MPEG 4 AVC or VC1 ie. Windows Media Video 9 codecs.
Those without deep pockets but still dreaming of one should contain their excitement and wait several months (around 3) as prices are expected to fall by a hundred thousand yen or so by then.
Our conclusion: The RD-A1 is simply ass-kicking, although wallet-kicking too!