Hitachi's 400GB hard disk video recorder

Hitachi has announced a crop of new DVD/HDD recorders for release in Japan later this year. Flagship in the excitably named WOOO range (which signifies "wonder", "world standard" and "worthwhile", in case you were wondering) is the MS-DS400, the first product to get the recently announced Hitachi Global Storage Technologies 400GB drive. It'll play DVD-RAM/-RW/-R discs, and will record to DVD-RAM/±RW/±R. As far as we can tell it doesn't have any TiVo-like technology for divining your tastes, though it does allow an extensive list of preferences and apparently has a range of search and display functions to help you keep track of all that's in there (which with a 400GB drive could be up to 67 hours even at the highest quality). An unfortunate omission is the ability to stream video over a network to a PC (present on the previous MS1000 model), which, so Hitachi claims, it left out to keep the product simple to use. The MS-DS400 should be out in mid-June in Japan, and will apparently sell for around Y145,000.