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Pioneer Eyes Volume Shipments of Blu-Ray Disc Drives in Late Jan.

Posted on: Tuesday, 27 December 2005, 18:00 CST

Tokyo, Dec. 27 (Jiji Press)--Japan's Pioneer Corp. said Tuesday it has developed a Blu-ray Disc read/write drive for desktop personal computers and will start shipping it in commercial volumes to PC makers in late January 2006.

The drive for the next-generation DVD, promoted by a group led by Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. , supports the new disc's write-once, rewritable and read-only specifications.

Matsushita is also planning to start mass production of Blu-ray drives for desktop PCs almost at the same timing.

Toshiba Corp. , which promotes a rival format called High- Definition DVD, is expecting to launch notebook PCs with HD DVD drives in the spring of 2006.

The release of desktop PCs with Blu-ray drives is expected in the spring 2006 or later.

Pioneer has already started sample shipments of Blu-ray drives, but their mass shipments may be delayed, depending on the start date for the Blu-ray disc format logo license and the copyright protection technology license, it said.

The company has no definite plan at present for shipments of Blu- ray drives for notebook PCs, company officials said.END

Source: Jiji Press English News Service

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