Sony ditches DVD for Blu-ray in Japanese DVRs

Tokyo (Japan) - Sony has announced that it will no longer produce DVD-based personal video recorders, and instead will put all of its eggs in the Blu-ray basket.

Alongside the announcement, Sony unveiled four new Blu-ray Disc-based digital recorders. They contain support for dual-layer discs, which can hold around eight hours of HDTV content.

All of the new models also include hard disk drives of up to 500 GB. Users can burn HDD-stored video to recordable BD media at up to 4x speed. It supports the AVCHD, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 AVC formats.

The players will be available in Japan in November, ranging in price from around $1,200 to $1,750. Sony currently has much less ambitious plans for BD-based video recorders in the US, and has not announced availability for the four new devices outside of Japan.