Matsushita Electric Industrial will release its blue ray disk recorder on the Japanese market by start of August. The recorder is the DMR-E700BD, and is anticipated to have a retail price of around 300,000 yen.

The unit will accommodate dual-layer single sided blu-ray media (50GB capacity), and single layer media (25Gb capacity) and comes with built in digital and analog tuner.

It will allow videotape recording to Blu-ray media as well as DVD-RAM and DVD-R media, but without the use of a HDD. The 50 GB capacity of Blu-ray dual-layer media, corresponds to about 4.5 hours BS digital signal (24Mbps) or 6 hours digital signal (16Mbps) available on high-definition television broadcasts, or about 63 hours of standard analog signal broadcast.

Blu-ray media is expected to be available by start of August also.