Panasonic today has started shipping samples of the world's thinnest (9.5 mm height) internal Blu-ray Disc (BD) drives to personal computer manufacturers. Now available to PC manufacturers, the new sample 9.5 mm high BD drives, were accomplished by combining Panasonic's own technologies such as the low-profile, 2-lens actuator and spherical aberration compensation mechanism and an optimized optical design for CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc laser.Even with its 9.5 mm high thin profile, the new Panasonic BD drive features double speed reading and writing for both write-once BD-R and rewritable BD-RE discs. The product is also capable of reading and writing on BD-R DL (dual layer/50GB) and BD-RE DL discs and will be compatible with future organic pigment-type BDs.

The new Panasonic drive provides a DVD Super Multi Drive function plus Blu-ray Disc support. Further, it is capable of 8x writing on DVD-R/+Rs, making the handling of DVDs fast and easy. The samples will be exhibited at the 2008 International CES, the world's largest consumer electronics show, to be held from January 7, 2008 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.