Blu-Ray and HD DVD

This is a format I have been watching with great interest.

This is a step in the right direction, if for no other reason than the ability to supply HD DVD to the masses. My Sony player was not expensive, so hopefully I won't get killed when I go to Blue-ray.

QUESTIONS and ANSWERS:

Who developed Blu-ray?

The Blu-ray Disc format was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of leading consumer electronics and PC companies with more than 100 members from all over the world. The Board of Directors currently consists of:

Apple Computer, Inc.
Dell Inc.
Hewlett Packard Company
Hitachi, Ltd.
LG Electronics Inc.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Pioneer Corporation
Royal Philips Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Sharp Corporation
Sony Corporation
TDK Corporation
Thomson Multimedia
Twentieth Century Fox
Walt Disney Pictures

What Blu-ray formats are planned?

As with conventional CDs and DVDs, Blu-ray plans to provide a wide range of formats including ROM/R/RW. The following formats are part of the Blu-ray Disc specification:

BD-ROM - read-only format for software, games and movie distribution.
BD-R - recordable format for HDTV recording and PC data storage.
BD-RE - rewritable format for HDTV recording and PC data storage.

How much data can you fit on a Blu-ray Disc?

A single-layer disc can fit 23.3GB, 25GB or 27GB.
A dual-layer disc can fit 46.6GB, 50GB or 54GB.

To ensure that the Blu-ray Disc format is easily extendable (future-proof) it also includes support for multi-layer discs, which should allow the storage capacity to be increased to 100GB-200GB (25GB per layer) in the future simply by adding more layers to the discs.

How much video can you record on a Blu-ray Disc?

Over 2 hours of high-definition television (HDTV) on a 25GB disc.
About 13 hours of standard-definition television (SDTV) on a 25GB disc.

My take is this will work. It is almost unprecedented for that many big names in the electronics world to agree on a single format. I think others have joined since this announcement and now includes Texas Instruments.

Looks very promising.

Sgr

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM use a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup and allow playback of CDs and DVDs.

The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

(YES)

I hope that whatever happens, the consumer is offered movies in a compact, high definition format that is affordable.

Icing on the cake would be a better digital audio format, one that would outshine CD, DVD and SACD. Probably asking too much, but I can dream.