Panasonic Moves on Blu-ray Drives
Online staff -- EDN, April 24, 2006
Panasonic announced Friday that it has developed an internal Blu-ray disc drive for desktop computers in Japan.
The company will begin offering the half-height internal Blu-ray disc drive, dubbed as the LF-MB121JD, on June 10. Prior to the introduction of the BD drive, Panasonic will release 2x-speed 25GByte and 50GByte non-cartridge BD-R and BD-RE discs for PC drives on April 28.
Panasonic ups the ante in the battle of the high definition DVD formats. Just last week Toshiba’s HD DVD player started shipping to U.S. retailers, four months ahead of Sony’s scheduled release of its Blu-ray format players. Also in the HD space, TDK earlier this month started shipping 25GByte recordable and rewritable Blu-ray discs to retailers nationwide.
Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based market research firm ABI Research believes neither format has the upper hand yet and that the ongoing “battle of the brands” will cause the prices of both players and discs to likely remain at relatively high levels longer than if there were a single standard.
"Panasonic is committed to the Blu-ray technology, as we believe BD delivers true benefits of better image quality in visual entertainment," said Kazuhiro Tsuga, Matsushita’s executive officer in charge of digital network and software technologies, in a statement.
The drive, complied with Blu-ray Disc Association BD-R, BD-RE and BD-ROM standards, can read and write single-layer 25GByte and single-sided, dual-layer 50GByte BDs, as well as DVDs and CD. Supporting the three generations of optical discs, the 41.3mm high internal BD drive is compatible with 11 different writable optical discs and 13 different readable optical disc formats.
The drive comes bundled with a variety of software for users to backup and archive a large amounts of data, edit video and audio and drag and drop data for DVD and CD burning.
For use in low-profile drives, Panasonic introduces non-cartridge type (bare disc) 25GByte and 50GByte rewritable and write-once Blu-ray discs for computers. The discs support recording and transferring data at 2x speed (maximum 72Mbits/sec.), which approximates 6x write speed of DVD (1x data transfer rate for DVD is defined as 10.8Mbits/sec.). The dual-layer Blu-ray discs can store up to 50GByte of data, 10 times the capacity of conventional single-sided 4.7GByte DVD discs, the company said.
