Panasonic (News - Alert) has started shipping samples of the world’s thinnest (9.5-mm height) internal Blu-ray Disc (BD) drives to personal computer manufacturers. The company had introduced the industry’s first 12.7-mm-high internal DVD Super Multi Drive in 2003. Since then, Panasonic has been continuously improving their optical disc drive technology by making the drive’s profile even thinner, to 9.5 mm en route to 7.0 mm. The samples will be exhibited at the 2008 International CES (News - Alert).

 

The demand for Blu-ray discs and BD drives is increasing fast thanks to the increasing need for data volume on personal computers and the gaining popularity of high-definition digital images. Panasonic believes that apart addressing these needs of the customers, the world’s thinnest BD drive also caters to notebook PCs that are also becoming thinner and lighter. The company continues to introduce lighter versions of BD drives by producing key devices in-house and is leading the industry in providing the benefits of Blu-ray discs.

 

To produce the 9.5-mm-high BD drives, Panasonic combined its own technologies such as the low-profile, two-lens actuator and spherical aberration compensation mechanism and an optimized optical design for CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc laser. Even with such a thin profile, the BD drive sports double speed reading and writing for both write-once BD-R and rewritable BD-RE discs. This feature was achieved with the use of technologies such as broader bandwidth of the light-receiving element, improved light usage efficiency and high-speed recording waveform.

 

The new drive is compatible with optical discs like BD, DVD, CD. It supports reading of BD-ROMs and reading and writing on four types of BD media (BD-R, BD-RE, BD-R DL, BD-RE DL). It can read DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs and can read and write seven types of CD/DVD media (DVD-RAM, DVD-R, +R, DVD-RW, +RW, CD-R, CD-RW). The new drive is capable of 8x writing on DVD-R/+Rs and it provides a DVD Super Multi Drive function plus Blu-ray Disc support.