Posted by Ian on March 19th, 2008 at 12:17 PM CST

AOpen sent out a press release this morning, announcing its first Blu-ray Disc drive. The BDR0412SA is capable of reading BD media at 4x and is backwards compatible with most existing CD and DVD formats.

For your best video and storage experience, AOpen announces the first Blu-ray Disc drive BDR0412SA. It can read Blu-ray Disc at 4X (17,844KB per sec.), DVD-ROM at 12X, DVD+/-R at 12X, DVD-RAM at 5X and CD at 32X; and gives you an all in one optical reading option for multimedia entertainment.

Blu-ray Disc (BD) is an optical disc storage media format using blue-violet laser with shorter wavelength. Blu-ray Disc was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association, a group of leading electronic companies: Sony, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung. It has the same dimensions as a standard DVD or CD but can hold 25GB (single layer) and 50GB (dual layer).

No word yet on pricing or availability. As we find out more, we'll let you know. In the mean time, AOpen's entire press release can be found here.