All Hail Blu Ray !

[Elandyll]

Among the general nitpicking these days (even with the PS3's last update), I find it refreshing to have a positive point of view on the market evolution

I specially like the "possible" exemple they use to advocate for it

http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=6755

Thursday, March 27, 2008
Tech: All Hail Blu-Ray
High definition ? first came the screens, now the discs
By Carey Allan

The DVD as we know it is on its way out. Seems the capacity of those discs for holding information is already antiquated and out of date, and the new king of information carrying discs is called the Blu-ray disc (known in short as "BD"). Basically the Blu-ray format won a short-lived format war between manufacturers in February and has emerged as the only high definition disc format commercially available. As an interesting note, Sony, which championed Blu-ray lost the last great format war in the 1980s when the BetaMax video tape was dropped in favor of the VHS tape format. This time Sony enlisted the backing of major manufacturers like Apple, Dell, JVC, LG, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung and Sharp to ensure success.

BDs are similar to DVDs but are played back using a blue laser — hence the name. That specific color laser allows the amount of information to be placed on the disc to be increased almost five fold. So while an original DVD can hold 4.7 gigabytes of information, a BD can hold about 25 gigabytes (the double sided Blu-ray disc can hold up to 50 gigabytes of data). To us, that means that the people who convert film and TV programs to disc can now capture most, if not all of the original audio visual information in the conversion process. To fit on the smaller-capacity DVD much of that information was lost, and, although the DVD was better than tape, it was always a big compromise in visual quality.

Remember the difference you first felt when you saw a film on DVD after having watched VHS tapes for 10 years? The quality improvement was amazing. And can you visualize looking at the Grand Canyon through the darkened glass windows of a Lincoln Town Car and then opening that window and seeing the colors and depth for real? That is the experience in store for you with Blu-ray high definition discs. This newest home entertainment format is now entering our living rooms. It is the introduction of a truly exponential order of magnitude increase in quality, a vastly upgraded form of DVD

The full theatrical sound frequency will also be included on these discs because there is enough room — from full booming bass to widely separated eight channels of sound.

Technically, to display all of this incredible amount of information on screen a new type of television was introduced a few years ago called high definition television (HDTV).

These began to be marketed in earnest around 2003 with the arrival of 42-inch plasmas starting at $10,000. Today HDTVs are on sale starting at $500 for 36-inch screens scaling up to 150-inches costing $100,000. The specification for high definition (HD) is the key to all this innovation. Historically the picture on the standard definition (SD) American television set is shown at a resolution of 648x486 pixels (a measure denoting the number of dots on the screen). The high-definition standard is 1920×1080 pixels. That is, for every single frame on your screen, HD has over 2 million pixels on the screen, compared to 314 thousand for SD. The result: HD is at least 6.5 times sharper and clearer than SD. With HD, you won't need reading glasses to see every hair on Scarlett Johansson's head, or the blades of grass during an NFL playoff.

Because the higher resolution requires much more space DVDs are giving way to Blu-ray discs. So you can view HD programing at home. Imagine the impact of Lord of the Rings bursting into your living room.