Blue ray discs are the latest breakthrough in technology. This new optical disc format 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 BDA boasts 180 of the world’s leading consumer electronics, media and personal computer manufacturers.
Just as the name denotes, the blue ray discs use a blue-violet laser to access data as against the existing technology of red laser. A blue-violet laser (405nm) possesses very shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), thus enabling the focusing of the laser spot with exceptional accuracy. The plus point of this is that it allows data to be held in smaller space as the data could be squeezed in compactly which in turn allows the user to store extra data on the disc even though the disc is more or less the same size as a compact disc or a DVD. Moreover, blue ray discs afford a comprehensive storage capability. A single-layer blue ray disc can store up to 27GB of data which is more than 2 hours of high-definition video and 13hours hours of standard video. The double-layer blue ray disc could hold fifty GB of data which is 4.5 hours of HD video and normal video in excess of twenty hours.
Blue ray discs are the perfect definition of the ultimate user experience. It additionally permits the rewriting, recording, playing and distribution of HD videos. The blue ray discs have been based on the bare disc physical factor which renders it consistent with compact discs and DVDs.
Blue ray discs 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 which thereby reduces costs. This savings balances out the expenses of adding the protective layer required on blue ray discs which means that the end price cannot be very different from the price of a regular DVD. Blue ray discs also boasts of an advanced data transfer rate of thirty-six Mbps over the present-day DVDs that does the data transferring @ ten Mbps. This means that it would take only an hour and a half to record 25GB of data onto a blue ray disc.
The conventional DVDs and CDs initially came into the market with merely read-only formats. Anyway, the blue ray discs hope to be introduced in a comprehensive range of formats that is to include –ROM (read-only), BD-R (recordable) and BD-RE (rewritable).