Buffalo just announced the world’s fastest Blu-ray recorder that is capable of burning through your data at an 8x speed. It’s available in Japan beginning next month. You can get an External version and an internal version. The BR-816U2 External features eSATA and USB port. The BR-816FBS can be connected by SATA.

CDs and DVDs are also supported of course. You’ll get a max 16x burn to DVD±R or 48x/24x for CD-R/RW. Each drive is being bundled with Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 7 suite. The external drive will cost you about $435, while the internal is about $380.

Samsung is kicking out another home theater in a box system which sports an included Blu-ray Disc player. This one is called the Samsung HT-BD2E and pricing will be at around $800.

The Samsung HT-BD2E, which will be available in August, joins two similar systems Samsung already offers. This particular system reportedly offers the same quality features as the others while also offering a more “user friendly” 5.1-channel design. It includes your four typical statellite speakers, a center channel and a passive subwoofer.

That’s 25GB per layer. The technique used by Pioneer should be backwards compatible with all of the existing Blu-ray gear since the specs and lenses needed for pickup are identical, but it’s not clear if players would need some kind of modified optical pick-up to see the data. The prototype they used is read-only but they just need time. Pioneer will give more details on July 13th.

Pioneer has several new Blu-ray players hitting Europe. The 2.0-compliant BDP-LX91, Designer BDP-LX08 and BDP-LX71 and the BDP-51FD. All feature 1080p24 support, HDMI 12-Bit Deep Color support, KURO LINK, DTS-HD Master Audio / Dolby True HD compatibility and professional-quality Wolfson Digital Audio Converters.

No word on pricing for any of them yet however. The BDP-LX71 is rumored to be coming in September, the BDP-51FD & BDP-LX08 in October and the BDP-LX91 in the cold of Winter.

LaCie earlier this week did some updates to its d2 Blu-ray drive product, including upping the burn speed. The new LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive prices at around $650.

The LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive now sports a burn speed of 4x and ecords, rewrites and reads 25 gigabytes (GB) or 50GB BD-R (recordable) and BD-RE (rewritable), as well as DVD±RW DL and CD±RW. Also updated is the aluminum alloy case and software suite, which features Roxio software such as Easy Media Creator for Windows and Toast Titanium for Mac.

Hitachi has announced a new Blu-ray burner that can create discs from the latest camcorders with eSATA ports. The DZ-WR90 plugs straight into the camcorder and automatically creates discs from the footage that you select. So, you don’t need a computer. It even finalises the discs automatically, making it an easy complete one-step process.

The drive will also work with DVD-R discs, and even supports double-sided media as long as you’re willing to flip them yourself. They’re claiming that a Blu-ray disc will fit around three hours of full 1920 × 1080 footage and burn in 1.5hrs; or up to six hours in 1440 × 1080 resolution. A DVD can store up to one hour of 720 × 480 footage. This should make it easy for anyone who wants a simple way to share their video.

LG Electronics in the Middle East has released the Super Multi Blue Blu-ray Disc Rewriter, the BE06. The fastest rewriter that reads and writes Blu-ray at 6x. It’s aimed at laptop users or those with multiple PCs connecting USB 2.0 and a DC power connector.

It also has Optical Pickup Technology supporting Blu-ray disc write/playback, HD-DVD playback, and DVD/CD write playback. You can get one for $549, but as far as availability in the U.S., there’s no word just yet.

The Magnavox and Sylvania branded Funai NB500 Blu-ray players have been spotted at Walmart. A number of Walmarts apparently. The NB500 is a Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player and is priced at a fairly reasonable $298. It’s got HDMI version 1.3, HD audio codec’s, and DVD upscaling.

Yes, these are low end players, and already somehow outdated, but the price being what it is, it’s going to get it’s share of buyers. We’re not really sure what you can expect performance-wise, but if any of you brave souls should buy one, do let us know in comments.

Pansonic has itself its first new home theater in a box (HTiB) system with an integrated Blu-Ray Disc player set to go on sale. It is called the SC-BT100 and you’ll find it for around $1,000.

The Panasonic SC-BT100 includes speakers and a subwoofer for a 5.1 channel experience. It can be upgraded to wireless full 7.1 channel sound with the optional purchase of two side speakers and a transceiver. The included Blu-ray Disc player has “the Final Standard Profile for advanced functions such as Bonus View and audio mixing, which allows the consumer to switch the sound between the main and sub windows.”

Pioneer revealed their latest two Blu-ray players, the Elite BDP-05FD and BDP-51FD. Both support BonusView extra disc content and 1080p True 24fps output, they have HDMI 1.3a ports, four Wolfson Professional Audio 12-bit digital-to-analog converters and the proprietary PureCinema Deinterlacer for upscaling standard definition DVDs. The Elite BDP-05FD has fancy gold-plated connections and capacitative controls.

If you combine either of these with any of Pioneer’s KURO HDTV sets, both players have the ability to set-up automatically to a screen-specific factory preset. Other presets include projector settings as well as other displays. 7.1 surround sound, with Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD and DTS HD Master decoding are all supported. The 51FD has a 108MHz 12-bit video encoder, while the 05FD has a 297MHz version. These will be priced at $599 for the BDP-51FD and $799 for the BDP-05FD. They have also improved the speed of the players due to customer demand.

It’s never as much fun to write an article to report on things that aren’t going to happen, but in this case we think this is something that should happen and we still expect it to, despite Microsoft’s denials.

What we do know is that Microsoft had an HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 which they put a stop to producing. We also know that rumors keep cropping up that Microsoft is going to work something out with Sony to bring a Blu-ray player to the 360, and Microsoft continues to squash them.

For those of you who like Super hero statues sawed off at the waist or higher, this deal in Japan may be for you. If you’re in Japan. And a geek. On July 23, Japanese folks will get their chance to own Batman Begins on Blu-ray.

That’s about two weeks after release in the U.S. Our gift set edition comes with story boards, script pages and a $7.50 movie credit towards Dark Knight, but in Japan they will get a 25 cm tall bust. Which begs the question, why are we always getting left out on all the cool stuff? What’s the deal with that? The standard Blu-Ray will be around $47, the gift set edition is about $180.

Sony is launching it’s BDZ series of Blu-ray recorders, with the A70 and high-end T90 that are capable of picking up unprotected HDTV feeds, relying on AVC (H.264) encoding in order to record shows for future viewing on their 320GB and 500GB hard drives. If you like, you can record videos straight to Blu-ray, and it can also convert videos directly to portable formats, which is really handy.

Some other features include both analog and digital TV tuners, Sony’s Room Link, HDMI output, S-Video, and RCA. Both models will ship on April 30th in Japan. The prices start from $1,664 upwards. No info yet on whether we will see these in the US.

With the end of the format wars it’s time for those out there who have been waiting to buy a HD format DVD player to jump in with Blu-ray. The players are still expensive for the most part, but they are expected to begin dropping in cost soon.

Dell announced that its Inspiron 1525 now features a Blu-ray player and HDMI out at well under $1000. Dell says that a Blu-ray equipped 1525 will start at $879. If you have needed a new notebook and have an HDTV this is the way to go. $825 is reasonable for most notebooks and the addition of the Blu-ray and HDMI out will have you watching on your big screen in no time.

It looks like Sony’s next firmware update for the PS3 might include even more than the BD-Live interactive content on Blu-ray discs and the loss of the max file size for some video media. According to PCWorld the 2.20 firmware upgraded for the PS3 will also bring the ability to transfer Blu-ray movies from discs on the PS3 to the Playstation Portable.

This would be a nice feature for Sony to add sounds like it would be not unlike the Digital Copy we saw from FOX movies for iTunes. Instead of taking the time to convert each film into a special version for the PSP, some Blu-ray discs would have a “portable copy” of the movie that can be transferred to the PSP.