Panasonic DIGA DMR-E500HS DVD Recorder

Panasonic announced its DMR-E500HS high definition DVD Recorder. We attended their press event and listened to Alberto Reggiano go over some of the impressive features:

• 400 GB hard drive (yes, you read that correctly) 709 hours of storage in EP mode and 90 hours in DVD quality
• TV Guide on-screen program guide (no subscription fees, 8 day advance programmability)
• SD/PCMCIA slot
• Ability to send content from one room to another via a selectable GUI interface
• High speed 8x DVD-R burner
• IEEE 1394 input for DV camera archiving and recording to DVD-R
• Ability to browse MPEG-4/JPEG files from a networked PC
• Support for DVD-RAM/DVD-R/DVD-video/DVD-Audio/MP3/CD-R/CD-RW
• Gold-plated 5.1 channel analogue outputs

They set up a great demo whereby they used the networking capability of the DIGA DMR-E500HS to stream video content from the source unit to another DMR-E500HS/display over Ethernet. The idea is that you could sit in your bedroom and stream/watch recorded content that was stored on your DVD recorder in the living room. The MSRP for the DMR-E500HS is $1499.