Japanese home electronics and appliance manufacturers are churning out expensive, high-grade products to take advantage of the growing number of free-spending consumers.
"For a high-definition recorder like this," he said, "you expect to pay a lot. I'm considering getting it within a year," said a 38-year-old man, declining to be named, from Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, who made the trek to Tokyo to check out the world's first HD-DVD format recorder.
Toshiba Corp. launched its next-generation DVD recorder on July 27. It says the machine, part of a 21st century VHS-Betamax war over rival recording formats, can record high-definition images with six times as many pixels as conventional recorders.