Rocket 15 Science and Technology

This future optical disc format – BRD (Blue Ray DVDs is a remarkable invention of the BDA (Blu Ray Disc Association) that consists of TDK, Thomson, Sharp, Pioneer, Philips, Mitsubishi, Sony, JVC, Panasonic, Samsung, Apple, Hitachi, LG, Dell and HP). 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. HD video content uses up a considerable amount of hard drive space too. Two hours of HD content with data compression necessitates up to 22 GB of storage space while a DVD-18 disc (dual-sided dual-layer disc) has a storage capacity of only 17GB.

The solution to this problem has let to the development of two technologies – HD DVD and Blu Ray DVDs – that are now in fierce competition with each to gain market share and become the successor of the 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 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 HD-DVD disc only store 15 GB whereas single-layer blue ray DVDs can store 25 GB which is more than 2 hours of high-definition video and 13hours hours of standard 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.

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. This savings balances out the expenses of adding the protective layer required on blue ray DVDs which means that the end price cannot be very different from the price of a regular DVD.