He was not kidding. The thing was massive. The size of four pizza boxes stacked high, the hottest thing in home entertainment was about as hot as stale pizza and, at a retail price of more than US$1,000, just about as tasty.

However, with prices quickly falling, there is good reason to be excited about DVD recorders again.

No-name recorder prices have fallen below the US$250 mark and are heading for another $50 to $100 price cut over the next year. Worldwide shipments are estimated at 12 million units this year and 50 million in 2007, according to In-Stat/MDR.

By comparison, about 98 million DVD players - which typically sell for less than $50 - were shipped last year.

Taiwan's Market Intelligence Centre has a similar forecast, predicting 47.4 million units being shipped worldwide in 2008, up from 12.3 million this year.

But figures are just figures. What manufacturers and consumers want to know, respectively, is when will people buy them and when they will be cheap enough.

'We initially thought this product would be booming but sales have not been as good as we expected,' said Chiu Hong, export manager for Taiwan's Tatung, which assembles DVD recorders in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

In addition to price, Mr Chiu cited customer education as a big barrier to acceptance. 'It takes a lot of customer knowledge to know how to record.'

In-Stat/MDR senior analyst Michelle Abraham agreed. 'Anything that makes a DVD recorder easier to program will definitely be a help.'

In addition, prices must fall to a level low enough to trigger mass acceptance, but there is no consensus as to what the figure should be.

Natascha Lu, vice-president of manufacturer A-Zone International, which has one model in pilot production, said: 'The market will accept this type of product in big quantities after the price drops a lot later, just like LCD TVs.'

Dongguan manufacturer Winbase Electronics has a range of DVD recorder models for shipping under a customer's brand name.

Louis Leung, from the foreign trade department, said: 'I think around US$200 for retail [would be the key price].'

Mr Chiu said his company aimed for US$150.

To a large extent, pricing is out of the hands of manufacturers because they are beholden to component makers. LSI Logic, Cirrus Logic and Phillips are the key DVD recorder chipset vendors and have been aggressive in development and pricing, a good thing for manufacturers and consumers, and a reason why retail prices are expected to fall quickly in the coming year.

What manufacturers can control, however, is features. On this point they seem to differ in their approach. In addition to standard DVD functions, DVD recorder features include different record quality/time settings and programmability.

They are the little differences that consumers would do well to look out for. An even bigger issue though is whether to include a hard disk, and turn the device into a personal video recorder (PVR), at a price premium of $200 to $300.

The hard disk will allow films, photos and music to be stored for playback. Ms Lu said customers would be interested in the built-in HDD, but Mr Leung disagreed.

There are geographical differences in what the market wants. Ms Abraham said: 'The North American market is actually different from Japan ... because several million households in the United States have a PVR.'