Blu-Ray DVD

Video technology has increased significantly over the past few years, and is continuing to grow at an incredible rate. DVD is most likely the last big jump in consumer video technology that everyone is familiar with. To keep up with the ever advancing world of electronics a new format of video storage will be released soon called Blu-ray.

Blu-Ray is a next generation optical disc which will blow the socks off of what we all know today: DVD. Conventional DVD uses a red laser which has long wave lengths, and limits the storage capacity on a disc. Blu-Ray uses a blue laser which has much shorter wave lengths. Because the wave lengths on the Blu-Ray are much smaller, it can focus on a spot with much greater precision, allowing for data to be packed much more tightly than the red laser DVD.

Blu-Ray discs can hold up to 50GB which is 10 times that of a 4.5GB DVD. 10 times storage will greatly increase the quantity of which we can save on any other disc and will change the way we save information. Dual Layer Blu-Ray disc will be able to hold up to 4 hours of High-Definition Video. High Definition video is going to hit big here, Blu-Ray is an example of a technology that is going to make it happen. 50GB is probably comparable to size of many of our hard-drives, and to picture having all of that information on a small disc that we can slide into a pocket and take wherever we want is a bit scary.

Hope to see Blu-Ray replacing DVD and VCR over the next few years, following along with the transition of video to High Definition Video. Video isn't the only thing that will benefit from Blu-Ray technology; I would expect that it will also become the standard for PC and other types of storage.