Panasonic has officially announced its new 8x Blu-ray Disc writer, the LF-PB371JD. This new drive features 8x BD-R, 8x BD-R DL and 2x BD-RE writing speeds as well as a maximum BD-ROM read speed of 8x. Here's part of their press release, translated from Japanese.
The Panasonic marketing headquarters sell the Blu-ray Disc drive for the personal computer data from September 13th. It is the Blu-ray Disc drive where this product conforms to the standard “Blu-ray of Blu-ray, Disc Disc Recordable Format Version 1.3” the postscript type Blu-ray disk of 1 layers 25GB, and 2 layers 50GB (BD-R) vis-a-vis, 8 time fast record can do 1 and 8 time fast playback. It made that the bulk data of hi-vision digital image and the personal computer etc which have started spreading quickly is retained at high speed possible.
The LF-PB371JD will be released to the Japanese market on September 13th. While Panasonic hasn't announced a price, AV Watch expects the drive to cost about 43,000 Yen ($394US). More information, including a full list of specs, can be found here.
