LF-MB121JD: Matsushita Electric Blu-Ray drives coming in June

Matsushita Electric has said that they plan to begin selling a Blu-ray Disc drive in Japan in June for use in desktop computers.

The important part of this announcement is that this drive would be sold as an aftermarket product. This means that users can purchase it for use on their existing computers.

However, the price of this drive would be steep and would require a high-end personal computer to offer full functionality.

The codename of the first drive to support Blu-Ray is LF-MB121JD and it is a half-height (41.3-millimeter high) model. This would make it compatible for usage into the standard drive bay of most desktop PCs. It would come with the ATAPI interface.

Impressively, this drive would be compatible with as many as 11 types of writable optical disc storage formats. This includes 25GB and 50GB BD-R (Blu-ray Disc Recordable) and BD-RE (Blu-ray Disc Rewritable) discs.

The company recommends that the user should at least have a system with a minimum of a Pentium 3 700MHz processor, 128MB of memory and 10GB of hard-disk drive space. It would support Windows XP, Windows 2000 and the 64-bit version of Windows XP.

This drive is expected to cost around USD 850 in the Japanese market. Company’s plans for the international market are unknown yet.