Co-published by: Neoprene Laptop Shuttles. This future optical disc format – BRD (Blue Ray DVDs is a remarkable invention of the BDA (Blu Ray Disc Association) that consists of TDK, Thomson, Sharp, Pioneer, Philips, Mitsubishi, Sony, JVC, Panasonic, Samsung, Apple, Hitachi, LG, Dell and HP). The BDA boasts 180 of the world's leading consumer electronics, media and personal computer manufacturers.
The days of DVDs are numbered. The necessity for storing HD content is increasing daily in the light of increasing number of people turning to HD television for their latest digital television fare.
But, DVDs support a resolution up to 720×480 pixels while high definition content resolutions are as high as 1920×1080 pixels. HD video content uses up a considerable amount of hard drive space too. Two hours of HD content with data compression necessitates up to 22 GB of storage space while a DVD-18 disc (dual-sided dual-layer disc) has a storage capacity of only 17GB.
The solution to this problem has let to the development of two technologies – HD DVD and Blue Ray DVDs – that are now in fierce competition with each to gain market share and become the successor of the DVD.
Both these technologies are very similar in nature but the blue ray DVDs have an advantage since these boast a far higher storage capacity than the HD DVD. As the name denotes, the blue ray discs make use of a blue-violet laser to write and read data in contrast to the existing technology which makes use of red laser. A blue-violet laser (405nm) has a far shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm) making it feasible to focus the laser spot with superior precision. The plus point in this is that as the data could be packed compactly it uses less space to store data and that fact lets users to add more data on the disc though the size of the disc is more or less the same as a CD/DVD.
A single-layer high definition DVD can hold only fifteen GB of data whilst single-layer blue ray DVDs can hold twenty-five GB which amounts to over two hours of HD video and thirteen hours of normal video. A dual-layer HD-DVD can hold up to 30 GB whereas dual-layer blue ray DVDs can store 54 GB which is 4.5hours of high-definition video and more than 20hours of a standard video.
Blue ray DVDs are also light on the manufacturers since these are built by injection-molding process on a single 1.1-mm disc compared to the traditional injection-molding process on a 0.6 mm (HD DVD follow the same method) which thereby reduces costs. This savings balances out the expenses of adding the protective layer required on blue ray DVDs which means that the end price cannot be very different from the price of a regular DVD.
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