Even though both Blu-ray and HD DVD have been battling on the market since last year, so far standalone recorders that record HD to Blu-ray or HD DVD seem to be limited to Japan.  While it is not clear yet when the US or Europe will see the first Blu-ray and HD DVD recorders, Sony has unveiled four standalone Blu-ray recorder models, which will launch in November in Japan.

All four of Sony's upcoming Blu-ray recorders will feature dual-layer Blu-ray disc recording with a maximum capacity of 16 hours per dual-layer Blu-ray disc, are backwards compatible with conventional DVDs and feature a hard disk of 250GB, 320GB or 500GB depending on the model.  The top model features a 500GB hard drive, 2 x Digital tuners, 2 x Analogue tuners, 24/60fps output and is predicted to sell for around $1,572 or around what Toshiba's upcoming flagship HD DVD recorder will be priced at.  With the growth of HDTV sets and HD camcorders, it is coming to the stage where consumers are starting to look for a way to permanently record content to discs. 

Unfortunately with all the hype over Digital Rights Management and the Broadcast Flag, once Blu-ray and HD DVD recorders finally hit the US and Europe, chances are that most HD TV programmes will be embedded with some sort of recording restrictions, such as preventing one from building a collection of TV episodes of a show or editing recorded content such as to cut out the commercials and so on.  If some find programme recording restriction issues with DVD recorders frustrating enough, this is likely to get even more frustrating with recording HD programmes to Blu-ray and HD DVD.