The drives are manufactured by Matsushita (Panasonic). Pansonic has just announced that its own brand of Blu-ray PC recorders will be available within six weeks or so. Both Panasonic and IO-Data will ship retail production shipments in early June.

The two IO-Data PC drives consist of an internal PATA BRD-AM2B and an external USB 2.0 BRD-UM2. Both drives have a maximum write speed of 2x and can read/record to dual layer DVD+R, dual layer DVD-R, DVD-RAM, CDR and dual layer Blu-ray recordable media.

Panasonic has suggested a price of $850 for its Blu-ray recorders.

This news article was written on April 23, 2006, quoting IO Data.