Here's a good article with photos of the current internal and external prototypes. The drive is scheduled for the 3rd quarter of 2006.

Some basic, but interesting technical details as well, I quote:

"A typical Blu-Ray disc will hold approximately 25GB (SL), or 50GB (DL). The Blu-Ray specifications indicate that the Blu-Ray drive will feature 36Mbps transfer rate, meaning that 1X (CLV) BD writing takes place at this rate. Note that 36Mbps is equivalent of 3.26X in DVD terms. At 2X, a full disc recording can take place in 46.5 min (SL) and 93 min (DL).

The second generation of Blu-ray drives is expected to support higher recording speeds. However, pushing the recording speeds further is not an easy task and requires developments in both hardware and materials. [...] For 12cm discs (CD/DVD), spinning an optical disc at 10,800rpm has been proven as the realistic upper bound for half-height drives. A 12cm BD disc rotates between 1955 and 821rpm (inner to outer diameter) at 1X speed, so simple calculations result to the fact that the 12X (CAV) is expected to be the upper limit (ceiling) for BD devices on a PC. This is a simple theoretical approach and of course, reaching the 12x CAV writing speed will also depend on the developments on the chemicals used for the disc (polycarbonate) and the performance/accuracy of the moving parts (hardware) used in a BD recorder.

So as long as both blank discs and component designs can keep up, a full BD-R (SL) disc may be eventually written in approximately 11minutes. in case of rewritables and multilayered discs. In practice, the upper limit might prove to be as low as 6x, due to their complicated structure."

And a few photos from aving.net.

["A tripe writer", ha-hah.]

Nice, but a price of €799 ($1,022 U.S.) and $20 per BD-R blank I think I will wait a little while.

If it writes to tripe then surely it's a quadruple writer......

Actually, the original article is here

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News...x?NewsId=16952