Blue Ray DVDs Are The Future For Home Cinema
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.
DVDs, lets face it have its days counted. With more and more people upgrading to HDTV to enjoy modern digital television, the need to store high-definition content is also on the rise. However, DVDs are known to support a resolution of 720 x 480 whereas HD content resolutions reach as higher as 1920 x 1080. HD video content uses up a considerable amount of hard drive space too. High definition content with data compression of about 2 hours duration requires up to twenty-two GB of storage space whereas a DVD-18 disc (dual-sided double-layer) allows a storing capability of seventeen GB only.
The answer to this issue has helped invent two brand-new technologies, namely High Definition DVD and Blue Ray DVDs, which are now locked in an intense battle to clinch market shares and become the successor to 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. The blue ray discs, as the name suggests, uses a blue-violet laser to read and write data unlike the current technology which uses 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 HD-DVD disc only store 15 GB whereas single-layer blue ray DVDs can store 25 GB which is more than 2 hours of high-definition video and 13hours hours of standard 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.
As an example, the Hobbit Movie Forum just announced the Lord of the Rings on Blu Ray would be out in the summer with the entire trilogy in high definition and on just three Blur-ray discs.
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.