During its annual seminar, which took place today, the 28'th of April, in one of the conference rooms of the Intercontinental hotel in Bucharest, Panasonic Romania has presented its latest products with which it intends to "dazzle" the Romanian consumers.

And a very interesting (and special) appearance, among all the gigantic plasma TVS, high-end cameras, music and communications systems, has been the first ever Blu-ray player presented in Romania.


Unfortunately for all the Blu-ray "hungry" Romanians, this particular model was compatible only with the NTSC broadcasting system, and has been brought by Panasonic from Japan in order to demonstrate the extraordinary image quality which can be obtained by combining the advantages offered by the Blu-ray standard with those of the HDTV ready plasma TVs, displaying images in 1080i mode.

Quite obviously, where there's a player, there must be a disc, and the the Blu-ray disc presented by Panasonic was a part of the company's new range of BD-ROM discs. Namely, we're talking about a rewritable dual layer disc, with a storage capacity of 50 GB, twice the capacity of the Blu-ray discs already on the market. As we've mentioned in one of our previous articles, this doubling of the storage capacity was possible due to the "spin coating" technology developed by Panasonic, which creates two writable layers on the same Blu-ray disc. Cheap UV technologies are used in this type of discs' manufacturing process, so the overall costs are quite low.

All we can hope for right now is that the Blu-ray players will arrive as soon as possible, although we'll have to wait at least until this fall, the period when, according to Panasonic, these players will hit Europe. However, they will be worth waiting for, considering the TV-watching experience they promise.