Panasonic announced plans for the 2006 introduction of blank Blu-ray (BD) discs in the United States.

The new discs will be available in both 50GB and 25GB storage capacities which can be used on BD drives with 2X writing speed. The following four models will be introduced in the U.S. market this spring:

Models LM-BE50DE and LM-BR50DE utilize a dual layer structure to realize the large capacity of 50GB. This dual-layer technology was first introduced by Panasonic in the Japanese market in 2004 with 1x speed.