Blue Ray DVDs Should Be The Way Forward For Home Cinema
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. 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. High definition video content also consumes a lot of hard drive space. 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. 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) carries a much lesser wavelength than a red laser. The advantage of this is that, it permits data to be stored in less space since the data can be packed more tightly, which further, allows consumers to fit additional data on the disc even though it may be the same size as a CD or a 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 double-layer High Definition-DVD can store up to thirty GB whilst double-layer blue ray DVDs can hold fifty-four GB which is 4.5 hours of HD video and more than 20 hours of normal video.
For instance, the Hobbit Movie Forum recently had a discussion about the news that the Lord of the Rings on Blu Ray would be released in the 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.
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