Gadget Bloggers

I’ve been hearing about this blu-ray thing (others think it is spelled as blue ray) and probably some of the non-geeky gadgeteers who has not yet done their research about blu-ray would find this article helpful.

A Blu-ray Disc (BD) is a next-generation optical disc format meant for high-density storage of high-definition video and data. The Blu-ray standard was jointly developed by a group of consumer electronics and PC companies called the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). It is currently competing with the HD DVD format for wide adoption as the prefered next generation optical standard.

A single-layer Blu-ray disc (BD) can store enough for approximately two hours of high-definition video with audio on a single layer 25 GB disc. Note, it is 2 hrs of HIGH DEFINITION, not just your average video.

The larger 50 GB discs may be difficult to make in a production environment. A dual-layer BD 50 GB discs can hold enough for approximately four hours of HD video. The BDA recently announced that they have created a working BD capable of holding 200GB of data. Now that’s stagerring. I haven’t even got a 100GB hard disk and they are now working on 200GB media.

One very well known an much awaited application for blu-ray disk is for the gaming industry. Sony has announced that the PlayStation 3 will be shipped with a Blu-ray drive, likely read-only as for all game console optical drives. It is expected to read all DVD and CD formats in addition to BD-ROM, BD-R, and BD-RE. The Japanese release date for PS3 is on November 11th, 2006. The release date of the PS3 everywhere else has been anounced for November 17th, 2006.

[read more about it here ]