DVD Recorder News

As DVD recorders continue to muscle in on turf long held by analog videocassette recorders, Panasonic is promoting a new model that offers several ways to snag, store, transport and play back your favorite television shows, home videos or photos. Within its slick silvery shell, the Panasonic DMR-E100H holds a 120-gigabyte hard drive next to its DVD recorder. There are also slots for PCMCIA and Secure Digital memory cards and a connection for a camcorder's FireWire cable.

The DMR-E100H can record and play video in the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats and display digital pictures in the JPEG or TIFF file formats. It can, with a single command, convert a recorded television show into a file that can fit on a Secure Digital card and then download it onto the card, enabling you to play back the program on a laptop computer or other device with an SD card slot.

The unit's hard drive can hold up to 160 hours of recorded material, and the recorder uses high-capacity DVD-RAM discs that hold up to 12 hours of video. To assure compatibility with other DVD players, the DMR-E100H can also record to the DVD-R format.

The Panasonic DMR-E100H has a suggested price of $1,200. Since it can also record one show while playing back another, the challenge may be finding enough shows worth recording. J. D. Biersdorfer

Source: NYTimes