Sharp Sells TVs With Built-in Blu-ray Disc Recorders

Sharp leads the competition by releasing its first LCD TV with built-in Blu-ray Disc Recorders. The set will be released in Japan next month and would be on sale in the U.S. before the end of this year. For Europe, Sharp will release it by 2009.

The DX-series models will be available in 26- to 52-inch screen sizes and include dual digital tuners, so owners can watch one channel while recording another. The Blu-ray Disc recorder embedded in the sets also supports the more efficient MPEG4 H.264/AVC digital encoding format, which means up to 5 times more video can be recorded on a standard Blu-ray Disc than with earlier models that support just the MPEG2 format. In the case of a 25G-byte disc almost 11 hours of high-definition (HD) TV can be recorded using the more efficient compression.

Additionally the system records associated metadata that is sent with the TV show.

The prices for the sets will range from ¥500,000 (US$4,900) for the 52-inch set to ¥170,000 for the 26-inch set. Blu-ray is slowly becoming very popular in Japan specially with the growth of the Playstation 3 game consoles.

Source:
http://www.avsforum.com