Not so long ago, as kids, we used to listen to old-fashioned phonograph records with our moms and dads, and the oversized radiola was all the rage. Very little time passed, and audio cassettes appeared, then audio CDs and MP3 discs. We didn’t have time to really get used to household media players, when smart TVs appeared, capable of broadcasting video from flash drives and from the Internet. One of the latest, rapidly gaining popularity of new products is Blue-ray. What is Blu-ray and what is the peculiarity of this technology - this will be discussed in our article.
Blue Beam
This is how the name of the latest development of the BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) is translated - a group of the world's leading developers of communications, personal computers and electronics. What is Blu-ray? This is a new latest generation optical disc format, which was invented specifically to facilitate the process of playing, recording and rewriting high-resolution video files, as well as for the convenience of storing large amounts of information. In order to bemore clearly, let's use the language of numbers and give some comparisons. To understand what Blu-ray is, imagine a DVD disc that holds more than five times the amount of information it normally would. Thanks to a new development, it can now store up to 25 GB (if it is single-layer) or up to 50 GB of data. And this is not to mention the fact that this technology is being improved and there is already support for the multi-layer of such discs.
The Blu-ray format is based on a new standard that reads data using a blue (violet, to be precise) laser with a wavelength of 405 nanometers. This explains the incomprehensible name for many. Older CD-ROM discs read at 780nm, newer DVDs at 650nm. Such a reduction made it possible at one time to increase the capacity from 700 MB to 4.38 GB (twice as much on dual-layer ones). Talking about what Blu-ray is, it is worth mentioning that this format allows you to write / read data at a speed of at least 36 Mbps!
Invention Story
Work on the new format began in 2000. Sony Corporation was one of the first to start doing this. Initially, the development went in two parallel directions: DVR Blue and UDO (short for Ultra Density Optical). Subsequently, the first technology was renamed "blue beam", i.e. Blu-ray. In the same year, the first prototypes were released and at the CREATEC exhibition, people first learned what Blu-ray is. The official announcement happened in 2002 and after that it wasthe BDA association was created, the purpose of which was to promote the new format. Toshiba Corporation decided not to join this alliance and, together with NEC, they began to develop their own version of a super-capacious drive. Also in 2002, these companies announced the Advanced Optical Disk, which was later renamed the HD DVD format.
The victory in this confrontation went to Blu-ray technology and since then sales of discs of this type have been steadily gaining momentum. Outwardly, they look the same as the usual DVD. But the quality of the video that, thanks to the large capacity, can be recorded on them (especially if it is Blu-ray 3 D), is so different from what we have seen before that literally everyone who sees it at least once, henceforth prefers to watch video only in this excellent format.
