In my quest to identify buying momentum for Blu-ray recorders, I spoke with Alison Traxler from Primera Technology. Primera offers a range of CD/DVD/Blu-ray recorders, from the inexpensive Bravo SE (20 disc capacity, $900 street with DVD-R/$2900 street with a $500 rebate till the end of May for Blu-ray) to rack mounted, multi-burner units that are much more costly.

Primera offers Mac and Windows clients with all units and has network software for $500 that allows unlimited number of Mac and Windows clients to send record/print jobs to any of their burners.

After three days at the show, Alison reported that “people are super excited that our Blu-ray solutions work with Macs; we’re the only company shipping a Mac solution in that price range.” She also commented “we’re also seeing a lot of interest from event and wedding videographers who are producing small numbers of discs for clients willing to pay for HD quality.”

I asked her when she thought Blu-ray equipped burners would start to out-sell traditional burners. She responded “I think around the holidays. Player prices will be dropping, and there will be more movies and just greater overall demand for Blu-ray. The faster Blu-ray players get in consumer’s homes, the faster demand will pick up for Blu-ray recorders.”

Pretty aggressive, but not unreasonable given that recorder prices will drop between now and then, reducing the price differential between Blu-ray and traditional DVD recorders. Blu-ray recorders can obviously burn all types of DVD-R/+R discs, and by the end of the year, if a Blu-ray recorder is only several hundred dollars more, it will make sense for most buyers to future proof their purchase.

For example, even pro videographers that still shoot in SD are mostly buying HD camcorders because they don’t want to spend several thousand dollars for a device that will be out of date in a couple of years. Applying the same logic to the recorder/printer market may accelerate Blu-ray buying faster than I thought.