Panasonic has developed the thinnest Blu-ray disc drive so far, targeted at laptop computers, which it plans unveiling at January's Consumer Electronics Show. At just 9.5mm in height, it is the standard height for most slim-line optical drives, thus allowing laptop makers to use them without the need for a custom built extra thick optical drive bay.
The drive features write speeds of 2x BD-R, 2x BD-RE and 1x BD-R DL and reads both formats at 2x. The drive is also capable of reading and writing to DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and CD-R/RW media.
So far, neither the Blu-ray nor HD DVD formats have taken off with the PC market, mainly due to the high drive costs, the format war and the higher media price per GB than hard disk storage. So Panasonic has already started offering samples to laptop makers in a hope that they will start including them in new PCs.
No pricing information has been disclosed yet.
