Peripherals, blu-ray, gadgets, home entertainment, laptops, panasonic, portable media, sony

Panasonic Announces World's Thinnest Internal Blu-ray Drive

Panasonic has announced their development of the world's thinnest internal Blu-ray drive. At just 9.5 mm tall, it's thin enough for laptops but still packs a performance punch. We're talking 2X recording for both BD-R and BD-RE (rewritable) discs, along with BD-R DL support (but we're guessing that the dual layer writing is just 1X...have fun burning those 50GB discs). The drive also supports DVDs with 8x burning on all types of discs. It's priceless for now with Panasonic only shipping units to manufacturers at the moment, but we'll get more details soon when it's on display at CES. [fareastgizmos]

9:16 AM on Thu Dec 27 2007
By Mark Wilson
2,147 views
8 comments

Comments

designguybrown at 09:24 AM on 12/27/07
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ahhhh... but do we have full blu-ray playback with 1080p and Profile v1.1 capabilities?... does any software out there have on-board blu-ray playback to Leopard?
TheSonOfKrypton at 09:35 AM on 12/27/07
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Can anyone say "thin enough for next revision of Macbook Pro" with me? Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbooooooooooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Buford T. Justice at 10:07 AM on 12/27/07
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Slight problem... NOT a slot-loader. Great for Sony and other slim-n-light vendors but doesn't do diddly for Apple. I'm sure they'll have a slotloading version soon.
Kaiser-Machead at 10:25 AM on 12/27/07
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@Buford T. Justice: Apple's not the only vendor that uses slot loaders, so that's more than possible.
RoCKSTaH53 at 10:40 AM on 12/27/07
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While it does seem timely for a Macbook revision, I doubt it. Like Buford said above, there is a slim chance Apple would use a non-slot load Blou-Ray drive for their Macbooks... not to mention that the big news is the Ultra Portable without an optical drive..

However, I would have to assume that the Mac Pro line is due for an update, and I would not be surprised if the new ones had some kind of Blu-Ray drive in it, as well as support for Blu-Ray in the upcoming 10.5.2 update due out "early next year." Let's hope they update the displays to match the new form factor.
v12spd at 11:15 AM on 12/27/07
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This is pretty much the only option I wanted from my Vaio TZ. Lets hope Sony gets on it and makes a new rev with Santa Rosa and Blu-Ray.
andrewzela at 11:21 AM on 12/27/07
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@TheSonOfKrypton:

I seriously doubt we'll see a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player in a Mac anytime soon. Optical media is dead to Apple - it's the old paradigm, and they make $0 from it.

They've made it very clear that they want you to buy (and now rent) movies directly from them, to store on your Mac's hard drive, sync to your iPod/iPhone, and stream to your AppleTV.
chillywilly at 11:53 AM on 12/27/07
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It's a start. Now as the others have said, we need a slotload for the MacBook Pro. If this thing gets under $400 eventually, I might seriously consider doing the replacement.