Matsushita pushes its DVD recorders: Panasonic to roll out 9 kinds of DVD recorders in 3 months.

If your VCR breaks now, would you buy another VCR--or would you fork it over for a DVD recorder? And how likely are you to buy cool digital equipment by such stalwarts as Sony, Panasonic and Pioneer at your nearest Walmart or other shop? VCRs have become old and stale, and their prices have been plummeting amid competition from Korea, Taiwan and China.

Matsushita Electric Industrials Inc., the maker of Panasonic consumer electronics brands, is especially aggressive in pushing DVD-recorders. The company will launch nine different kinds of DVD recorders, all of which belong to its popular DIGA series, in the next three months. Some of the nine will be simultaneously marketed outside of Japan.

Matsushita said in a press release that industrywide DVD-recorder shipments in Japan will jump 59 percent to 3.5 million units in fiscal 2004, which will end in March 2005. The projection is not as bold as it sounds, considering strong performances in the past. Shipments numbered 180,000 in fiscal year 2001, then climbed to 750,000 in fiscal 2002 and 2.2 million in fiscal 2003, according to Matsushita.

Matsushita estimates that only 7 percent of households in Japan own DVD recorders right now, significantly lower than the penetration rate for VDRs, which is probably more than 80 percent. The 2004 Olympics, which will take place in Athens in July, are also expected to boost demand.

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Six of the new DVD recorders are equipped with a hard disk drive, whose capacity ranges from 80GB to 250GB. For the sake of comparison, DVDs, which can contain a two-hour movie, hold 4.7GB of data. For the sake of price comparison, DVD recorders with a 160GB hard disk drive typically cost between [yen]90,000 and [yen]150,000.