Panasonic seems to be set to begin selling a Blu-ray Disc drive in Japan in June, aimed at desktop computers. This is the first Blu-ray Disc drive to be announced for the aftermarket, meaning that it will be sold as an upgrade for existing machines. Naturally, this drive is not cheap, and comes with a large price tag attached, but if you want to be the first to watch a Blu-ray Disc movie on your existing PC, something like this will be your only option.
The LF-MB121JD is a half-height (41.3-millimeter high) model, which means it will fit into the standard drive bay of most desktop PCs, and has an ATAPI interface. It's compatible with 11 types of writable optical disc, including 25GB and 50GB Blu-ray disc recordable (BD-R) and Blu-ray disc rewritable (BD-RE) discs, Kazuya Nakaya of Panasonic's disk drive manufacturing unit said at a Tokyo news conference.