We’re here at Birmingham’s NEC for the Gadget Show Live, I’m joined by Matt Milling from Panasonic. He’s going to be talking to us about two very exciting new products from Panasonic, the BS850 and BS750. Ok, so Matt, can you tell us a little bit about these products please?
We are introducing the UK’s first Freesat Blu-ray recording models, we have the BS750 with a 250GB hard drive model and the BS850 with a 500GB model.
OK, so you mentioned they’ve got Freesat, so do they have a single tuner or dual tuners?
These are the first products that we’ve launched, recording products, with twin Freesat tuners within them so you can watch one, record one, watch one, record two and watch maybe the hard drive or Blu-ray disk at the same time.
So you can record content from Freesat, and that includes high definition content, there’s a couple of high definition channels on Freesat, you can then store it on the hard drive and archive it to a Blu-ray disk – is that correct?
Absolutely, yes, we’ve got the BBC HD channel, ITV HD, we’ve got recordings on here of football matches and nature programmes. We can then store them on a Blu-ray disk and archive them forever.
OK, so how much footage, firstly, will you store on these model’s hard drives – the 250 GB and the 500 GBs?
OK, if we take the 500 GB model as an example, in full HD quality you can store roughly 77 hours on the 500 GB hard drive, in long play mode that would jump then to about 144 hours. However on a 50GB Blu-ray disk you can actually store 24 hours of full HD quality material so, for example, a whole series of Heroes.
OK, on a single disk, that’s quite a feat.
OK – now so you can save recorded TV footage on these devices but also you can save your photos, your music and your files from your high definition camcorders?
Absolutely, we have facilities to store your CDs on the hard drive as well and play them back. We have an SD card slot as well so you can all your high definition AVCHD cards from your camcorder or your jpegs from your Lumix digital camera.
OK, and then once you’ve got your AVCHD files from your camcorder onto the hard drive you’ll then be able to write them to Blu-ray disks immediately?
In actual fact, Ben, you can actually burn them direct to Blu-ray if you want to or store them on the hard drive as well – it’s entirely your choice.
And when are these going to launch?
These models should be with us by the end of June (2009) to the consumer, this is, as we’ve already said, the UK launch of these products.
And prices, have they been confirmed yet?
Prices are still to be confirmed, we expect them on the e-shop to be approximately £900 or £1,000.
Alright, well thank you very much Matt
Thank you Ben.
OK, right, well there are lots more PVR, set-top box and TV reviews at which.co.uk.