Digital Home Thoughts: Blu-Ray: Chaos Reigns...

"Specifics have been murky about how the Blu-ray Disc format can succeed DVD by enabling the recording of high-definition content. But the companies behind the format have recently tipped their hand to their strategy, including future enhancements. DVDs don't have the storage capacity to accommodate an entire movie in high-definition format but Blu-ray Disc does. That's largely because it uses blue lasers to read and write data on the disc, rather than the red lasers used by DVD. A blue laser makes a smaller spot on the disc surface, which means the space required for one bit of data is smaller--and more data can be fit onto a 12-centimeter disc..."

After reading the rest of this article, I'm left with one inescapable conclusion: Blue-Ray is an even bigger mess than the early DVD +R/-R wars were. Check this out:

"The path for early adopters isn't an easy one. The Sony machine uses 23GB discs while the Panasonic machine uses 25GB or 50GB discs. The result is that the Sony discs can be used for recording and playback in both machines but the same is not true of the Panasonic discs, according to Panasonic. The Sony machine can read the 25GB disc, after a 90-second delay in recognizing the disc, but recording onto the Panasonic discs using the Sony machine is impossible."

My take on it? 8.5 GB from a dual-layer DVD burner is quite a bit of data, and the complexities of the current Blu-Ray landscape make it a no-mans zone for now. Until movies start coming out in Blu-Ray format, I don't need to care about having a blue laser DVD player. I'll look this one up again in 2006, but for now it just makes me yawn...