Blue Ray DVDs Are The Future For HDTV
This next generation optical disc format – Blue Ray DVDs – is a proud development of the Blu Ray Disc Association (BDA) that include HP, Dell, LG, Hitachi, Apple, Samsung, Panasonic, JVC, Sony, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sharp, Thomson, and TDK. The Blu Ray Disc Association has the globe’s most prominent manufacturers of PCs, consumer electronics and media.
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. 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. 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. Though these two technologies are apparently similar to each other, the blue ray DVDs have a slight edge over the other as it boats of a greater amount of 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.
For instance, the Hobbit Movie Forum recently announced the Lord of the Rings on Blu Ray would be out this summer with the entire trilogy in high definition and on just 3 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. The money so saved is spent on the addition of a protective layer necessary on blue ray DVDs and this causes the end price to be more or less same with the current price of a DVD.