BWU-300S is the new Blu-Ray disc recorder from Sony. With 8x Blu-Ray recording speed, it can burn a 50GB BD disc in 30 minutes and a 25GB BD disc in 15 minutes. In addition, BWU-300S can record DVD at 16x and CD up to 48x. If interested, you can purchase it next month for €280 or about $409.

Excerpt from the press release:

The new drive is fully supported by Adobe® Encore® CS3 software, now included with Adobe Premiere® Pro CS3, and Sony’s Vegas Pro 8 and DVD Architect Pro 5 software, providing video production professionals with another option for outputting high-definition video on a Blu-ray Disc with MPEG-2 or H.264 compression.

Sony USA officially announced the availability of BDP-S350 Blu-Ray Disc Player. Features include a 7.1-channel Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus decoding and bit-stream output, as well as DTS HD high resolution Audio and Master Audio bit-stream output. The player also comes with Bonus View function (similar to Picture-in-Picture), Quick Start Up mode, and 1080p upscaling. To have this one on your room, you have to get around €250 out of your pocket.

Interested? Get any of Sony Blu-Ray Disc Players online (incl. this new BDP-S350 model) from Amazon.

If you’ve been waiting for the price of Blu-Ray burner to drop, well, the time has finally come. Now you can get a SATA-based 6x Blu-Ray recorder from Buffalo for just €240 (about $380). It is only available in Japan though, but you can expect it to hit your nearby PC stores soon enough. However, you have to pay an extra $60 (€40) if you want the external USB model. The choice is yours, my friend.

Sony currently offers a huge discount or every BRAVIA Blu-Ray Disc Bundle purchase. Customers can get up to $530 savings if they buy any of the available BRAVIA LCD TV (most of them are HD ready) and Blu-Ray player combo package. For example, a purchase of a 52-inch BRAVIA KDL-52W3000 LCD HDTV ($2,999.99) and BDP-S500 Blu-Ray player ($599.99) will only cost you $3,199.99 instead of $3,599.98 ($399.99 discount). But if you want the most of this offer, get the 52-inch KDL-52XBR4 TV and BDP-S2000ES BD player. This combo will set you back at $4,769.98 which is $530 cheaper than their original price.

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Another news from Fujitsu for today. The company has just announced that “TEO”, it’s seried media center desktop PC, will now be equipped with Blu-Ray reader drive as well. Other configuration for this high-end TEO90Y/D PC are HDMI support, a 500GB of hard drive, an ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 graphics engine, a 2GB of main memory, and a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo T5500 processor. It should be available immediately, but no words on pricing unfortunately.

LF-PB271JD is the latest Blu-Ray burner from Panasonic. It’ll be available in store starting from November 10th with a price tag of around €300. Regarding specs, this SATA-based drive can store your data on a 50GB BD-R2 media at 4x speed, as well as DVD-RAM at 5x and DVD±R DL or DVD+RW disc at 16x. Additionally, it comes with an 8MB of internal buffer.

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Sony Electronics has just announced that its second generation of internal Blu-Ray (BD) recorder, BWU-200S, will be soon released in U.S. According to the press release, the drive can burn data at BD-R media @ 4x, as well as traditional DVD+R @ 16x. With this speed, full 50GB of data can be moved to BD-R disc in about 45 minutes, which is half of the time required in its first generation model. BWU-200S will be bundled with Cyberlink BD Solution software, providing a comprehensive application for capturing, authoring, editing, burning and viewing high-definition personal content captured in the native HDV 1080i format from an HDV camcorder. In addition, the software supports recording on DVDs and CDs, as well as playback of DVDs recorded in the AVCHD format.

According to Bob DeMoulin, marketing manager for branded storage products in Sony Electronics’ IT Products Division, “Consumers and professional videographers alike can enjoy the huge storage capacity to record and experience high-definition video with our Blu-ray Disc drive,“.

Sony BWU-200S uses Serial ATA (SATA) interface and comes with standard 5.25-inch form factor. It is compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista operating system. The burner will be ready for purchase next month, directly from sonystyle.com website, for about $600.

LG Electronics presented LX97WH desktop PC in Korea market. Dubbed “Black Picasso Super Multi Blue Edition”, this machine comes with dual-format disc drive, supporting both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media. At just 8.9cm thick, it also features an Intel Bearlake platform, Intel Core 2 DUo processor, nVidia GeForce 8 Series graphics engine, 3D pattern case design, and a slide-type panel. Suggested price is set at about 1,500,000 (KRW). Monitor must be purchased separately unfortunately.

Pioneer has just unveiled a new Blu-Ray player called “BDP-95FD”. This is the first BD player capable of decoding all four HD-level surround sound formats — Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution, and Master Audio — as well as sharing media from/to any DLNA-equipped PC or device over Ethernet network. It also provides 24 FPS playback speeds, HDMI 1.3 with enhanced color, and a CEC linkup with supporting TV’s and receivers.

Pioneer BDP-95FD Blu-Ray Player is expected to hit the market in October with a suggested price of around $1,000.

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Hitachi’s Blu-Ray camcorder’s prototype, which previously unveiled during last year’s CEATEC show, will soon become reality. The company is currently working on this video camera recorder which will sport support for 8cm BD and DVD media. Hitachi claims that their first Blu-Ray camcorder will feature a 5.3 megapixel CMOS sensor, a full 1920 x 1080 resolution support, and the capability to record up to 7GB of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video. According to the schedule, the camcorder will hit the shelves in Fall.

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