Can someone tell me what a blu ray disc is?

Question

How is it different from a dvd?

Answer 1

The difference between a dvd, hdvd, cd and blue rays are merely technical. It is all about the laser and how the information is stored and maybe the material used to make the disk. A dvd uses a red laser. A blu ray uses a blue laser. The blue laser is at least half the size of the red laser meaning that you can stored double the information or more in the same space. The difference is like using a crayon and a color pencil. You can color a more detail picture with the color pencil because the tip is smaller. There might be other difference in the way the information is written to the disk but I'm not sure.

Remember that most of us do not need to know all the details to use the product. Only people that build the product or products that are going to use the blu ray need to know the exact nature of the beast. What the average user need to know are 2 things. 1) is that the more information you can squezed into an area the better a picture or movie "MAY" look. Remember that the fact that you saved a picture or movie to a blu ray will not improve it. What it will do is that you can put more information in it so the level of detail can be better. IS like saving a picture in high resolution. The higher the resolution the more details you can see. Especially when you zoom into it. The drawback is the size of the file so people compromise by getting a picture that is good enough as opposed to the best quality posible. 2) the other thing to know is that devices have to be made to handle this new format. You cannot play a blu ray movie or an hdvd on a regular dvd because the device or dvd player was not built for this in mind.

One final thing to note is price and availability of the product. There is a big competition between the blu ray and the hdvd. I think the blu ray has more capacity but it is more propietary. That is people have to buy the rights to use it from sony. So, you can buy one or the other but you may end up with useless equipment if the technology you chose did not win in the end.

Answer 2

Remember Beta vs. VHS. Same thing.....blue ray is a DVD with the data burned in so closely it uses a different light wave laser to read the data (BLUE). Because the data is so much closer together then a regular dvd it can fit much more data, meaning much more picture clarity. It is able to hold enough information for a High Definition picture. The only real difference to you is that you need a blue ray dvd player to play an HD Blue Ray disc and a HD dvd Player to play a regular HD dvd. My suggestion would be to wait to see which one wins the war to become the norm. Normal dvd's will play in these players so until either Blue Ray or HD becomes the norm for DVD's I would suggest buying regular DVD's for now.

Answer 3

Basically it is a new form of DVD that holds a lot more information. So the picture you see on the TV screen from a Blu-Ray can look a lot better than from a DVD, provided you have a TV that can handle the better picture resolution (HDTV).

Answer 4

It's a High Definition DVD

Can hold more things (50 GB)

Made by Sony, the PS3 is a Blu Ray Player

Definitely not 250 GB


"1.6
How much video can you fit on a Blu-ray disc?"


"Over 9 hours of high-definition (HD) video on a 50GB disc.
About 23 hours of standard-definition (SD) video on a 50GB disc."

Answer 5

Blu-ray is a Hi definition format it can hold much more info than a regular DVD disc. It is made for HDTV

Answer 6

Its like a dvd but its a High Def version of it. You can only play them on a Blu ray player. They are still pretty new.

Answer 7

blu rays clear definiton versions of dvd's for hdtv's basically...just clear movies without pixel boxes and etc.

Answer 8

it basicaly fits more information than other disks and u need a blue ray player to use them

Answer 9

It has a much bigger volume - up to about 250gb. But you do need a drive that will write to it.