Blu Ray Disc

Blu-ray is also know as the blu ray disc that is the next generation of the optical disc. The Blu-ray name is a combination of "blue," for the color of the laser that is used, and "ray," for optical ray. The "e" in "blue" was purposefully left off, according to the manufacturers, because an everyday word cannot be trademarked.

What is a Blu-ray Disc? A current, single-sided, standard DVD can hold 4.7 GB (gigabytes) of information. That's about the size of an average two-hour, standard-definition movie with a few extra features. But a high-definition movie, which has a much clearer image (see How Digital Television Works), takes up about five times more bandwidth and therefore requires a disc with about five times more storage. As TV sets and movie studios make the move to high definition, consumers are going to need playback systems with a lot more storage capacity.

Blu-ray is the next-generation digital video disc. It can record, store and play back high-definition video and digital audio, as well as computer data. The advantage to Blu-ray is the sheer amount of information it can hold:

• A single-layer Blu-ray disc, which is roughly the same size as a DVD, can hold up to 27 GB of data -- that's more than two hours of high-definition video or about 13 hours of standard video.
• A double-layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 50 GB, enough to hold about 4.5 hours of high-definition video or more than 20 hours of standard video. And there are even plans in the works to develop a disc with twice that amount of storage

Blu-ray advantages;

• record high-definition television (HDTV) without any quality loss
• instantly skip to any spot on the disc
• record one program while watching another on the disc
• create playlists
• edit or reorder programs recorded on the disc
• automatically search for an empty space on the disc to avoid recording over a program
• access the Web to download subtitles and other extra features

Types Of BD;

• BD-ROM (read-only) - for pre-recorded content
• BD-R (recordable) - for PC data storage
• BD-RW (rewritable) - for PC data storage
• BD-RE (rewritable) - for HDTV recording

Until today(16-Dec-2006) it is only available on desktop drive only and the fastest BD writer is only up 4x.

For more please refer to;

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/blu-ray.htm

http://www.blu-ray.com/