Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Winner Is: Blu-ray by .5 mm

I am not one to spend too much time revisting my past tech trends to highlight when I have been right, let alone wrong. However, here is one I made almost three years ago. In one of my very first posts on this blog, I stated:

...Sony may have learned its lesson and Blu-ray's larger recording capacity will win out.

Toshiba has announced it will stop producing HD-DVD players. Samsung will drop HD DVD and focus on Blu-ray production as well. Microsoft is already working on a Blu-ray Xbox 360 and dumping HD DVD by May. Sony has indeed learned their lesson from the Betamax.

As was the case with Betamax, Blu-ray IS the better technology.

Originally called DVR-Blue, Blu-ray's thinner coating is the reason behind behind the disc's higher capacity. An HD DVD disc calls for a 0.6 millimeter coating, while a Blu-ray disc requires 0.1 millimeters. Since the laser travels through a thinner layer of resin, it's able to focus more sharply and write 67 percent more data onto the disc itself. One single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold about 25 GB or over two hours of HD video plus audio, and the dual-layer disc can hold approximately 50 GB. They have already demonstrated 200 GB eight-layer technology.

The new challenge is to educate consumers why Blu-ray doesn't look good on non-HD displays.

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