Panasonic's Thin Blu-ray Disc Drive

Panasonic has begun shipping the world's thinnest internal Blu-ray Disc (BD) drives to PC manufacturers, so expect to see new thin and light notebook PCs with BD drives in 2008. According to Panasonic Communications Co., Ltd., the new sample 9.5 mm high BD drives were accomplished by combining Panasonic’s own technologies such as the low-profile, 2-lens actuator and spherical aberration compensation mechanism and an optimized optical design for CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc laser.

That's a mouth full, but the new BD drive also features double speed reading and writing for both write-once BD-R and rewritable BD-RE discs, and it is also capable of reading and writing on BD-R DL (dual layer/50GB) and BD-RE DL discs. As for compatibility, the new Panasonic Blu-ray disc drive will be compatible with future organic pigment-type BDs, as well as with three types of optical discs (BD, DVD, CD).

It supports reading and writing on four types of BD media (BD-R, BD-RE, BD-R DL, BD-RE DL) and reading of BD-ROMs. Fortunately the drives also handle "old school" discs like CD/DVD media (DVD-RAM, DVD-R, +R, DVD-RW, +RW, CD-R, CD-RW) and reading of DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs. Finally, the new drive provides a DVD Super Multi Drive function plus Blu-ray Disc support, and it's capable of 8x writing on DVD-R/+Rs.

via | AkihabaraNews.com