Betanews reports that it has heard from Samsungs national sales manager for optical storage that the company will start shipping PC Blu-ray combo drives in the last quarter of this year, in the first half of 2009 the company expects to ship it's first PC Blu-ray writers, which will be able to write to BD-R discs and also can write to CD-R and DVD recordable discs. The combo drive will combine CD/DVD writing with Blu-ray playback.

Samsung is in a joint venture with Toshiba (TSST) which was the initator of the HD DVD format, the other blue laser technology. Both formats were competiting to become the successor of the DVD format, and Blu-ray won. It is unsure if Toshiba will ever release Blu-ray products, but it has access to them through the TSST joint venture.