Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Comparing The HD DVD Player And The Blu-Ray Player

By Ferdinand Eusebio

There are essentially three types of DVD players available in the market: the omnipresent standard DVD player, the High-Definition (HD) DVD player that is perhaps less recognized, and the Blu-Ray Disc player. When the format wars regarding "DVD versus Blu-Ray" began, the comparison was primarily between the HD DVD player and Blu-Ray player. Both are high-capacity players that use their own proprietary HD format, which caused both technologies to be pitted against each other for market supremacy. This format war in actual fact ended in February of 2008 when Toshiba had declared that it would close down the manufacturing of HD DVD player.

High-definition video requires lots of disc storage. Unlike the standard DVD or CD players which uses red lasers, both the HD DVD player and the Blu-Ray player uses blue lasers. Due to its shorter wavelength in comparison to red light, the blue light is bale to produce tightly focused beam. Therefore, this leads to the blue laser being capable of storing more data in the same physical disc in comparison to the red laser. The main tool of a laser is the pinpoint focus which produces microscopic pits and bumps on the disc surface which later on is read as digital information. A blue laser's smaller and refined beam produces minuscule pits on the disc surface, which leads to minute pits and compressed data burning, thus greater data storage capacity.

A standard DVD player is capable of storing around 8.5 GB of digital data on a double or dual layered DVD disc, whereas the HD DVD player is capable of burning and reading data up to 30 GB on a DL HD disc player. The Blu-Ray player in turn can store 50 GB of data on a DL Blu-Ray disc. A standard movie in high -definition requires around 15 GB of data space. To hold data of huge capacity, optical format technologies are continuously developed.

Because of the format wars, Blu-Ray DVD movie releases and Blu-Ray formatted discs cannot be played on an HD DVD player, and the same is true the other way around. Consumers can buy a combo player that has support for both HD DVD and Blu-Ray playback, but this can be more expensive than buying both types of players separately. But in the very least, both the Blu-Ray player and the HD DVD player are backwards compatible with standard DVD/CDs, which is good news for those consumers who have already meticulously built music and movie libraries with red laser technology, and would not want the hassle of remaking their media collections from scratch.

The HD DVD is being backed by Microsoft and they have come out with a HD DVD player for their Xbox 360, similarly, Sony has got integrated with their PlayStation 3 the Blu-Ray player. But, the Blu-Ray player costs a little more than the HD DVD player. Some of the leading electronics manufacturers have come out with not only stand alone players of both Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats but also with combo players.

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