Las Vegas (NV) - Panasonic has started shipping samples of an ultra-thin Blu-ray disc drive for lightweight notebooks.

The consumer electronics maker said in a statement released Wednesday in Japan that the built-in optical drive, which is 0.37 of an inch thick, will be shown Jan. 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Previously, Panasonic's thinnest Blu-ray disc drive was a half-inch thick.

The new drive is capable of reading and burning high-definition DVDs in the Blu-ray format. It also supports reading and writing standard DVDs and CDs, and can store 50 Gbytes of content.

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