Sony NEC Optiarc has unveiled its first PC Blu-ray burner. The BD-M100A drive can burn single and dual-layer Blu-ray discs at double speed, and can handle both write-once (BD-R) and rewritable (BD-RE) Blu-ray discs. It's also fully backwards compatible with existing DVD and CD formats.
The drive supports the BD-AV format which compresses MPEG-2 videos in resolutions of up to 1080p.
It connects via ATAPI, and seems to be targeting those interested in data storage and self-produced HD content. There's no mention of it's ability to play back commercial Blu-ray film discs, but presumably it will depend upon how HD-friendly the rest of the PC configuration is.
There's not much more information about the drive, except that it's available Europe-wide now. More details as we get them.
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