News Release：Pioneer Completes its 2002 DVD-R/RW Recorder Lineup with the DVR-99H, Featuring a 120 GB Built-in HDD for a Maximum of 153 Hours of Recording

DVR-99H

November 12, 2002, Tokyo, Japan -- Pioneer Corporation (NYSE: PIO) announced today its new HDD/DVD recorder, the DVR-99H, featuring a built-in 120GB hard disk drive (HDD), to be introduced in Japan in late December 2002. Together with the DVR-77H having a built-in 80GB HDD, as well as the DVR-55 and the DVR-3000 DVD recorders both without HDD, the DVR-99H strengthens Pioneer's DVD-R/RW recorder lineup in Japan, providing the widest choice of DVD recorders for the busy year-end selling season.
DVD recorders in Japan are gaining momentum, with over 900,000 units expected to be sold annually in the Japanese market, the biggest DVD recorder market in the world, according to Pioneer's estimate for this fiscal year ending March 2003. Consumer demand is growing for devices that allow one to watch TV programs at a convenient time or record favorite TV programs for personal archives on DVDs. Consumers can now store various TV programs or other sources to HDD. Then they can edit the content and create personal DVD-R/RW copies to exchange among friends for DVD video playback. This is possible because of the DVD-R/RW formats' playback compatibility in the Video Mode with many existing DVD-Video players.

The new DVR-99H has a built-in 120GB HDD, the largest storage capacity in the DVD recorder industry ^*1. Recording time can be chosen in relation to the desired picture quality, from 26 hours in FINE Mode, 51 hours in SP Mode, 102 hours in LP Mode, and 153 hours in EP Mode. Manual Mode (MN) allows the recording condition to be specified by picture quality or time in 32 steps from the highest picture quality at 26 hours to the longest recording of 153 hours.
Thanks to the HDD's high-speed data transfer capacity, the DVR-99H can playback a TV program from the beginning, while its recording continues on the HDD, by using the "chasing play" function. It also enables recording of a TV program to the HDD during the playback of a DVD with the "simultaneous view and program" function.
The DVR-99H also utilizes the benefits of 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW recording speeds", ^*2 permitting high-speed dubbing between the HDD and DVDs. With this function, a one-hour TV program stored on the HDD in the EP Mode, for example, can be dubbed onto a new high-speed ^*2 DVD-R disc in less than 3 minutes at about 24x recording speed without deterioration in picture or sound quality.
By combining the benefits of the HDD and DVD-R/RW formats, in which discs are playback-compatible with many existing DVD-Video players, the DVR-99H completes Pioneer's DVD-R/RW recorder lineup for this calendar year 2002, meeting consumers' demands of the digital recording age.