Video technology has increased significantly over the past years, and is continuing to grow at an incredible rate. Digital Video Disc’s aka DVD’s are the most likely the last big jump in consumer video technology that everyone is familiar with. To keep up with the ever advancing world of electronics a new format of video storage will be released soon called Blu-ray.

Blu-Ray is a next generation optical disc that will blow the socks off of what we all know today: DVD. Conventional DVD’s use a red laser that have long wave lengths, which limits the storage capacity on a disc. Blu-Ray uses a blue laser which has much shorter wave lengths. Because the wave lengths on the Blu-Ray are much smaller it can focus on a spot with much greater precision, allowing for data to be packed much more tightly than the red laser DVD’s.

Blu-Ray discs can hold up to 50GB’s of information which 10 times that of a 4.5GB DVD. 10 times the storage will greatly increase the amount of information that we can save on any one disc and will change the way we save information. Dual Layer Blu-Ray discs will be able to hold up to 4 hours of High-Definition Video. High Definition video is going to hit big here, Blu-Ray is an example of a technology that is going to make it happen. 50GB is probably comparable to size of many of our hard-drives, and to picture having all of that information on a small disc that we can slide into a pocket and take wherever we want is a bit scary.

Expect to see Blu-Ray replacing DVD and VCR over the next few years, following along with the transition of video to High Definition Video. Video isn’t the only thing that will benefit from Blu-Ray technology; I would expect that it will also become the standard for PC and other types of storage.

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