It’s only going to be available in Japan for the time being, but Toshiba has unveiled the RD-A1 HD DVD (Japanese) recorder, the first HD DVD to hit any market, anywhere.
The RD-A1 will be marketed under Toshiba’s Vardia brand, and is expected to be available July 14 for Â¥398,000, which converts to just under US $3,500. What does that kind of money buy? Well, for one thing, the RD-A1 is expected to ship with a 1 TB hard disk, enabling users to store about 130 hours of HD programming, which they can burn to both single-layer 15 GB HD DVD media and 30 GB HD DVD disc media, as well as DVD-R/RAM/RW/R-DL.
The unit includes its own tuners for terrestrial analog broadcasts, Hi-Vision (HD programming in Japan), support for Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS-HD audio codecs, and supports 1080P output via HDMI. Users can hook up just about anything else they like as well: the unit supports component, i.Link, coax, S-video, and optical outputs via a sprawl of ports on the back of the unit. Just make sure you get everything plugged in right the first time, because you aren’t going to want to keep moving the thing around: the RD-A1 weighs in at 15.2 Kg (about 33.5 pounds).
Toshiba says it expects to offer the RD-A1 in overseas markets eventually, and believes it will sell about 10,000 of the systems by the end of 2006.
