Sony and NEC formed sometime ago a joint venture company named Optiarc that is aimed at designing and manufacturing optical drives and this new company just announced the launch of a Blu-ray drive that is aimed at the mobile computing systems. The manufacturing company claims that this new optical drive unit will allow laptop and notebook producers to equip their products with Blu-ray capabilities.

The new Blu-ray compatible optical drive unit from Optiarc is cheap enough to be possible to bring Blu-ray capabilities even on medium level laptops and notebooks and its usefulness is extended by the fact that it can also act as a normal CD and DVD burner. As the number of Blu-ray capable optical drive units aimed at the mobile computer market segment is very low right now, we may assume that Optiarc just hit the jackpot and providing that the BC-5500A optical drive is as good as advertised, it could not only bring important revenues but also help popularize the Blu-ray optical disc format which is in competition with the HD DVD.

When it comes to writing CD and DVD mediums, the Optiarc BC-5500A optical drive is capable of handling the burning process of both single layer DVD±R/RWdiscs and dual-layer DVD±R, DVD-RAM discs as well as CD-R/RW media. This optical drive is capable of writing DVDs at speeds ranging from 4X to 8X, while writing CDs it is capable of reaching 16X speeds.

According to the news site reghardware, the manufacturing company said that the new optical drive compatible with the Blu-ray format is now readily available for purchase and that it comes with a price tag of $335. The announcement of this laptop and notebook intended optical drive comes just after Sony, the parent company of Optiarc, officially launched a similar drive, capable of playing Blu-ray compatible discs, but which is aimed at the desktop computing market segment instead.