Blu-ray is a new optical disc standard based on the use of a blue laser rather than the red laser of DVD players. The standard was developed collaboratively by Hitachi, LG, Matsushita (Panasonic), Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Thomson. Toshiba and NEC are among the companies promoting a competitive optical format, HD-DVD .
Blu-ray’s storage capacity is enough to store a continuous backup copy of most people’s hard drives on a single disc. The first products have a 27 gigabyte ( GB ) single-sided capacity, 50 GB on dual-layer discs. Data streams at 36 megabytes per second ( Mbps ), fast enough for high quality video recording. Single-sided Blu-ray discs can store up to 13 hours of standard video data, compared to single-sided DVD’s 133 minutes. People are referring to Blu-ray as the next generation DVD, although according to Chris Buma, a spokesman from Philips (quoted in New Scientist ) “Except for the size of the disc, everything is different.”
