Since the automotive market is going through the worst period in a very long time, with new car sales dropping to unprecedented low levels, the same phenomenon has affected the market for auto accessories, fewer and fewer companies either preparing or developing products for this particular field. However, that's not the case with Mitsubishi, which has apparently decided to take Blu-ray outside the confines of one's living room and into their car.

So, as Japanese website TechOn informs us, the company has managed to design and develop a 1DIN automotive Blu-ray Disc (BD) player that has only 1/3 the volume of the maker's home BD player, which makes it slim enough to fit within the dashboards of most vehicles.

Hence, the first available prototype of this Blu-ray player designed for the automotive market measures just around 50 x 178 x 180mm and supports pretty much all of the Blu-ray disc formats, including here BD-ROM, BD-R and BD-RE.

Apparently, in order to reduce the size of the player, the engineers from Mitsubishi have increased the board density, at the same time reducing the size of the mechanical parts and improving the anti-vibration performance of the equipment.

Since Mitsubishi is also involved in the automotive manufacturing market, it's very likely that this new Blu-ray player will find its way into Mitsubishi vehicles, in combination with the company's car navigation systems. However, if such a situation occurs, it's very likely that certain compatibility issues might appear, since the aforementioned navigation system is based on Windows CE, while the Blu-ray player uses Linux as an operating system (a reminiscence from the set-top version).

Mitsubishi plans to have the first working units out by the end of 2009, but it remains to be seen at what price, and whether these things will be made available just for aftermarket shops or will also be available in stores.


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