Panasonic Announces Ultra-thin Blu-ray Drive for Notebooks

Panasonic says the thinnest Blu-ray drive ever made will be on display at CES 2008 in January

Ardent road warriors are always on the lookout for smaller, thinner and lighter notebook computers. With Blu-ray movies becoming more commonplace the same road warriors are also looking to systems with Blu-ray drives as well.

The problem with Blu-ray drives is that the typical Blu-ray drive for notebooks is about 0.5 inches thick. The typical standard DVD drive for a notebook is only 0.28 inches thick. This represents almost twice the heft for the Blu-ray drive compared to the standard DVD drive.

Panasonic announced a new ultra-thin Blu-ray drive aimed at notebook computers and UMPC systems that measures in at only 0.37 inches thick. This new drive is capable of reading Blu-ray discs and writing to Blu-ray media as well.

The thin drive will also read and write to standard DVD and CD media. InformationWeek reports Toshiba will have an equally thin HD DVD drive as well. While Blu-ray drives that both read and write Blu-ray media have been available in notebooks for some time, only recently were notebooks touted HD DVD writable drives.

Toshiba announced new notebook systems this month that feature the first rewritable HD DVD drives. Panasonic says its new thin Blu-ray drive will be on display in January at CES 2008.