What is a Blu-Ray?
2011
Back in 1997, a brand new home video format was introduced that utilized digital sound and video to provide the sharpest images and clearest sounds to homes.
The format was known as the Digital Video Disc, or DVD, and it has since unseated VHS as the leading home video format all over the globe.
DVD appears to be on its way out. However, just like the large analog VHS tapes prior to them, DVDs are on the verge of being made obsolete by a relatively new format: Blu-ray.
Blu-ray players and discs were released in June 2006, although they were beaten to the marketplace by HD-DVDs by a couple of months. Each formats were produced to keep up with recently-released high-definition TVs which provided photos and sound that were sharper than what standard DVDs were capable of providing.
Even though B-ray initially faced competition from HD-DVD, B-ray won the "format war" in 2008 when HD-DVD players and discs had been pulled from the marketplace.
Blu-ray gets its name from the blue-violet laser that is utilized to read the discs. The standard DVD player utilizes a red laser which has a much longer wavelength than blue/violet light. The shorter wavelength of a B-ray laser permits B-r discs to shop almost ten times as a lot information as a standard DVD.
Most single-sided DVDs can hold four.7 GB (gigabytes) of information, which is concerning the size of a standard-definition two-hour movie with unique functions. A single-sided B-r disc, on the other hand, can hold 27 GB of information.
This is enough for much more than two hours of high-definition video or thirteen hours of standard-definition video. A double-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 54 GB of data, which is great for over 20 hours of regular definition video and 4.5 hours of high-definition video.
While the very first Blu-ray players in the marketplace had been relatively expensive, their growing recognition and also the fact that they're rapidly overtaking DVD players on the market has made them more readily available and inexpensive.
B-ray has even began to replace DVD-ROMs in computers as well as DVD recorders. Probably the most advanced computers on the market now come with B-ray drives.
