The first Blu-ray Disc Drive from Pioneer available on the market in January

Dec 27, 2005 16:12 GMT  ·  By

Pioneer Corp is planning to reveal its first Blu-ray Disc format optical disc drive for personal computers at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). CES will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from January 5 to January 8, 2006. The company said that the drive will hit the market at the end of January in Japan.

Pioneer announced that the BDR-101A drive is compatible with non-cartridge single-layer recordable BD-R, rewritable BD-RW discs and single and dual-layer read-only BD-ROM discs. It will also be compatible with a wide range of DVD-based media and will be able to write DVD-R and DVD-RW discs. Akira Muneto, a spokesman for Pioneer in Tokyo, said that the drive will have an ATAPI interface that delivers a data transfer rate of 33M bytes per second. It's a standard "half-height" size and measures 14.8mm wide by 42mm high by 198mm deep; it weighs 1.1 kilograms.

Muneto said that Pioneer plans to initially offer it to Japanese PC makers to be included in their desktop computers and systems and will later expand sales to other countries. It's scheduled to be available in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2006. This means that PCs on the market with Blu-ray Disc support could appear in the first half of 2006.

Pioneer's drive is the first announcement of a shipping date from any optical disc drive maker although its January schedule may be delayed due to the time taking process of licensing the content management system or Blu-ray Disc logo.

Toshiba Corp put the launch plans for its HD-DVD player on hold because of the inability of the companies behind the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) to complete their work. AACS is made up of a number of companies from the electronics and content industries including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros.

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