Tech Shout!

Panasonic has announced that they have begun the shipment of samples of what they claim to be the world’s thinnest internal Blu-ray Disc (BD) drive to PC manufacturers. This drive measures just 9.5mm in height.

Panasonic was the pioneer optical disc drive technology right from the time that the company introduced the industry’s first 12.7mm high internal DVD Super Multi Drive in 2003.

Now the dimensions of this BD drive are just 9.5 mm (H) x 128 mm (W) x 127 mm (D).

As it is the demand for BD drives is quickly rising. This growth can be attributed mainly due to the increasing need for data volume on PCs and the increasing popularity of high definition digital images.

The new Panasonic 9.5mm high Blu-ray Disc drive samples were accomplished by combining Panasonic’s own technologies like the low-profile, 2-lens actuator and spherical aberration compensation mechanism and an optimized optical design for CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc laser.

The new Blu-ray drive offers double speed reading and writing for both write-once BD-R and rewritable BD-RE discs. It is also capable of reading and writing on BD-R DL (dual layer/50GB) and BD-RE Dl discs and will be compatible with future organic pigment-type BDs.

Further, the new Panasonic Blu-ray drive is compatible with two other types of optical disc besides Blu-ray format, which include DVD and 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. In addition, it is capable of reading and writing on seven types of CD/DVD media (DVD-RAM, DVD-R, +R, DVD-RW, +RW, CD-R, CD-RW) and reading of DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs. Thus, the new drive provides a DVD Super Multi Drive function plus Blu-ray Disc support. Further, it is capable of 8x writing on DVD-R/+Rs, making the handling of DVDs fast and easy.

The samples will be showcased at the 2008 International CES consumer electronics show which is scheduled to be held from January 7, 2008 onwards at the Las Vegas Convention Center in the US.