"...Panasonic announced today that it will unveil the industry's first combination DVD-RAM/R drive next week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas. The new drive will ship to OEMs and channel partners in the second quarter. Aggressively priced, the MSRP will be under $1,000. Panasonic will demonstrate the drive with professional video production systems at NAB.

The combination DVD-RAM/R drive leverages Panasonic's 15 years of experience in high-density, phase-change-type recording/reading technology and builds on its nearly three-year track record of delivering nearly two million highly reliable rewritable DVD drives. Offering unprecedented versatility, the new drive delivers on Panasonic's commitment to provide a single, interchangeable solution for home video, personal computing, business storage/archiving as well as master DVD development and testing.

One of the NAB demonstrations will highlight the Panasonic drive being used to support the workflow of DV tape-based acquisition, non-linear editing, DVD authoring and DVD-R distribution for consumer playback. In the second demonstration, the company will demonstrate high-definition MPEG-2 files being played back at nearly 20Mbps. Reinforcing its commitment to DVD Forum standard technology, Panasonic will also demonstrate a consumer DVD-RAM recorder/player, consumer DVD player and DVD-R authoring drive..."