With the emergence of High Definition television and HD recording, future of optical storage is changing. Blue laser technology is the answer to high definition formats. Blu ray disc is next generation technology used for storing HD video. The name is ‘Blu ray’ because blue color ray is used to read and write to the disc. HD DVD remains Blue ray technology’s main competitor; however, Blu ray has a greater capacity and stores up to 50 GB on disc.
Blu ray media is perfect for supporting high quality HD video; up to 1920 x 1080 dpi. When played back on Blu ray player, it gives sharp images, surround sound, vivid colors and superb cinema experience. Blu Ray disc can store more data than CD or DVD. The reason is DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R use red laser beam for reading and writing data; the blue- violet laser beam used for Blu ray media, allows it to pack more data and thus storage is more. Even though the blu ray disc is of same size as a CD or DVD, the blu ray disc stores much more than them. BD-R discs can be written once while on BD-RE, data can be erased and re- written a number of times. For a single layer disc, the capacity is 25 gigabytes and for double layer discs, it is 50 Gigabytes. Up till now BD-R and BD-RE drives up to 6x are sold in the market by companies like Verbatim, and TDK. Taiyo Yuden, the famous Japanese DVD media maker, recently entered blu ray media by launching BD-R LTH (low to high) media. It will support recording at 2X. It is a write once format and disc features an organic dye recording layer while other discs have inorganic dye recording layer.
