Hitachi and Mitsubishi have HD DVD-R/RW media on the way

Though HD DVD has soundly beat Blu-ray to market on the consumer end, they're lagging a bit behind when it comes to burners. Now the format is following the same inexplicable pattern of Blu-ray by getting the recordable media out first, without even an announcement of HD DVD recorders to work with the media. Hitachi and Mitsubishi are leading the charge to bring the pricey coasters to market, announcing HD DVD-R media will be released in Japan on July 5th with RW and dual-layer versions to follow later this summer. The 15GB HD DVD-R media should go for about $17.75, which doesn't seem much of a value compared to the $20 Blu-ray discs, which hold 25GB, and were supposed to be pricier due to the new manufacturing methods. There's also no word of 2X discs right now, so we're worried our HD DVD friends could be chugging along at about half the speed of their Blu-ray counterparts.

[Via HD Beat, Watch Impress]

Read - Hitachi HD DVD-R/RW
Read - Mitsubishi HD DVD-R/RW

[TIMMAH! @ Jun 8th 2006 11:18AM]

"The 15GB HD DVD-R media should go for about $17.75, which doesn't seem much of a value compared to the $20 Blu-ray discs,"

Uh, for that matter, the $0.20 4.7GB DVD-R discs.

[Todd @ Jun 8th 2006 11:41AM]

I am not familar with HD, but aren't most movies longer than 75 minutes?

[jon @ Jun 8th 2006 11:56AM]

It would be rediculous to even think about burning movies to a medium that cost as much as it does to just buy the movie flat out. And of course there's always DIVX, Xvid and other compression formats that would do away with the size real quick.

But I agree with the poster above...at $.20 for a 4.7GB DVD-R these are far from being practical or even useful for the average Joes Data Storage needs.

Hard Drives are way cheaper & faster and way more compatible and easily portable to other computers.

[KawF @ Jun 8th 2006 11:59AM]

So, I might be bad at math, but from my extensive calculationsbased on the values in the article, the Blu-Ray-disc costs less per gigabyte of storage space.

So, where's all the people crying about how Blu-Ray is sooooo much more expensive that you'd have to include your first-born in the deal to get a Blu-Ray-disc?

HD-DVD ($/GB): 1,1833... and even more '3's
BD-Disc($/GB): 0,8

Less cost is regularly what is considered "cheaper", the defenitions may have changed since I last looked it up though.

[0ndsk4 @ Jun 8th 2006 12:00PM]

#2:
Movies will surely be on 30gb discs, just like DVDs are on 8 gb discs, not 4.

...and dual layer burners will be expensive, just as dual layer media will be equally expensive. I think its on purpose, just to fuck with people who want to safety copy their media. This is also a reason why I hope blue-ray will win.

[hmurchison @ Jun 8th 2006 1:21PM]

Well honestly neither format is all that cheap. Blu-Ray has the advantage in that it was designed from the beginning as a recording forma holding 23GB. A few tweaks here and adding software layers for movie disty and bam..you have a new format.

HD-DVD started life as a ROM based format so it's pathway to recording a wee bit longer. I'm not so sure either format is really that much of a necessity for consumers who rarely generate 15GB of new content to backup a day unless they are doing some naughty things.

[TheG @ Jun 8th 2006 1:39PM]

Hate to do this to youse guys, but you REALLY should read the press release. Both Hitachi and Mitsu are doing both HD and BD. Impress Watch might have been a little biased towards HD or their post was to focus solely on HD-DVD, but if you look at the companies' websites, you'll see they offer both BD and HD. On top of that, Maxell is releasing info about the DL and RE versions too.

Kinda makes the whole statement about HD beating out BD moot, eh? This would even warrant a post title change.

BTW, Maxell = Hitachi? If not, edit, edit, edit!

[DLoney @ Jun 8th 2006 4:03PM]

"The 15GB HD DVD-R media should go for about $17.75, which doesn't seem much of a value compared to the $20 Blu-ray discs,"

Ummm... The $1000 Blu-Ray player does not seem like much of a value compared to the $500 HD-DVD player...
Am I missing something?
:p

[DC @ Jun 8th 2006 7:17PM]

Why does everyone assume that these prices are etched in stone and will never change?

Does anyone here remember how much recordable CD media cost when it was introduced? How about recordable DVD media?

[wanderer @ Jun 8th 2006 7:40PM]

So if dual-layer HD-DVD = 150 minutes, many blockbusters will need a disk swap and every movie will need a separate disk for bonus features? Quality.

[hmurchison @ Jun 8th 2006 7:55PM]

The 75 minutes is based off of a 25Mbps datarate (most likely MPEG2). The Japanese seem enthralled with that datarate so I wouldn't be surprised to see them standardize on that as the base. However with High Efficiency codecs 18Mbps is easily equivalent in quality and that would give you just under 2hours of recording.

Like DVD there is no set datarate so rating media by mintues makes little sense.

[John @ Jun 9th 2006 3:45AM]

"Ummm... The $1000 Blu-Ray player does not seem like much of a value compared to the $500 HD-DVD player...
Am I missing something?"

You missed the $500-$600 PS3, which is a fully featured BluRay player, among other nice features, unlike the feature stripped $500 HD-DVD players...