Panasonic To Ship Form Factor-Standard Blu-ray Drive

Lucas123 writes "Panasonic plans to unveil the thinnest Blu-ray Disc drive made yet at the upcoming CES show. The drive is 9.5mm high, which allows it to fit into standard laptop form factors instead of requiring manufacturers to redesign systems to fit high-def DVD players as they've been doing. 'Panasonic has already begun offering samples of the drives to laptop makers with the hope that the companies will build it into new PCs.'"

...what?

[moogied]

Sony, one of the largest laptop manuf.'s, doesn't make bluray's for the laptop??

I'm confused..

Re:...what?

[Original Replica]

at least the stuff made by Japan Inc works. Can't say the same for stuff made by USACorp.

Hey planned obsolescence [wikipedia.org] worked quite nicely for decades. Don't think our consumer psychology would be the same in the western world without it. Hell, some people still buy a new car/tv/whatever every three to five years because planned obsolescence has taught us that older consumer products are junk. The stuff works fine, just the way it was designed to.

Re:After Rootkitting?

[Serge_Tomiko]

Umm, what Sony product are we talking about here? This is a panasonic drive that uses media developed and supported by an industry consortium, of which Sony is one of a dozen companies.

Laziest slashdot poster ever

[SuperKendall]

Wow, I see posters unwilling to read stories linked to before but it's been a long time since I've seen one not even willing to read the summary! Panasonic is not exactly a subsidiary of Sony.

Regardless what you think of Sony, Blu-Ray is a format with a wide range of hardware makers defining the standard - not just Sony. It's not like the Betamax situation with Toshiba and HD-DVD.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because this is talking about a Blu-ray drive which is useful for burning GBs of stuff to give away. It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that DRM comes in at the software layer and only comes into play when running software to watch movies produced by studio. It has nothing to do with burning a BD that only has, say 20 GB of home movies that need to be edited.