Blu Ray
What Is Blu Ray?
Blu Ray Disc, is the name of the next generation optical disc format. The blu ray format was developed to smooth the progress of recording, rewriting, and playback of high definition videos, along with storing large quantities of data. The design offers more than five times the storage capacity of any of the traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25 GV on a single disc and 50 GB on a dual layer disc. The name blu ray came from the blue-violet laser than is used to read and write the data on the new format and from ray (optical ray). The older technologies such as DVDs, are read with a red laser.
Even though the types of lasers used to read blu ray products are different, they can be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs by using a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup component. There are many benefits to using a blue-violet laser over the red laser. The shorter wavelength of the blue-violet laser makes it possible to focus the laser spot with incredible accuracy. This allows the data that is read to be packed more tightly and stored into much less space. Even though the blu ray disc is the same size as a CD or DVD, it holds much more data than the older discs.
The blu ray disc format was developed by an association called the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). It is made up of almost 200 of the leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers. These companies include Apple computer, Inc., Dell Inc, Hewlett Packard Company, Hitachi, Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Pioneer Corporation, Sharp Corporation, Sony corporation, Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, and Warner Bros., Entertainment, just to name a few.
There are many formats of the blu ray disc that will be provided. The BD-ROM, which is a read only format, will be made for HD movies, games and software. BD-R will be a recordable format for HD video recording and computer data storage, over nine hours of high definition video will fit onto a 50 GB disc, and more than 20 hours of standard definition video will fit onto a 50 GB disc. BD-RE is a rewritable format for HD video recording and computer data storage.
Where can you find blu ray products? Already many retailers are selling blu ray movies in their stores. The blu ray players, recorders, drives, writers and other media products can be found from Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Philips and pioneer stores throughout the US and Canada. These first generation blu ray products are quite expensive. In the near future, with product supply and demand rising, the price should fall fairly quickly. As production volumes increase, the actual production costs of the players and hardware should go down and the price will eventually be comparable to DVDs.
The plan is that blu ray discs will replace the DVDs that we currently use. The blu ray format has received incredible support from most all of the major movie studios. Almost all of those same studios currently have movies released in Blu Ray format. |