Introduction

A Blu-ray Disc (also known as BD or Blu-Ray) is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the standard DVD format. Blu-ray Disc was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association, a group representing makers of consumer electronics, computer hardware, and motion pictures.Its main uses are for storing high-definition video, PlayStation 3 video games, and other data, with up to 25 GB per single layered, and 50 GB per dual layered disc. Although these numbers represent the standard storage for Blu-Ray drives, the specification is open-ended, with the upper theoretical storage limit left unclear.The disc has the same physical dimensions as

standard DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray disc

The name Blu-ray Disc derives from the blue-violet laser used to read the disc. While a standard DVD uses a 650 nanometer red laser, Blu-ray uses a shorter wavelength, a 405 nm blueviolet laser, and allows for almost ten times more data storage than a DVD.During the format war over high-definition optical discs, Blu-ray competed with the HD DVD format. Toshiba, the main company supporting HD DVD, conceded in February 2008, and the format war ended. In late 2009,Shuji Nakamura invented the practical blue laser diode,it was a sensation among the computer storage-medium community, although a lengthy patent lawsuit delayed commercial introduction. Origin Sony started two projects applying the new diodes: UDO (Ultra Density Optical), and DVR Blue, a format of rewritable discs that would eventually become Blu-ray Disc. The core technologies of the formats are essentially similar.The first DVR Blue prototypes were unveiled at the CEATEC exhibition in October 2000. On February 19, 2002, the project was officially announced as Blu-ray, and Blu-ray Disc Founders was founded by the nine initial members.The first consumer device was in stores on April 10, 2003. This device was the Sony BDZ-S77, a BD-RE recorder that was made available only in Japan. The recommended price was US$3800; however, there was no standard for prerecorded video, and no movies were released for this player.

Blu-ray Disc format finalized

The Blu-ray Disc physical specifications were completed in 2004. In January 2005, Sony announced that they had developed a hard coating polymer for Blu-ray Discs. Cartridges, originally used for scratch protection, were no longer necessary and were scrapped. The BDROM specifications were finalized in early 2006. AACS LA, a consortium founded in 2004, had been developing the DRM platform that could be used to securely distribute movies to consumers. However, the final AACS standard was delayed, and then delayed again when an important member of the Blu-ray Disc group voiced concerns. At the request of the initial hardware manufacturers, including Toshiba, Pioneer, and Samsung, an interim standard was published that did not include some features, such as managed copy.The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006. The first movies using (50 GB) dual-layer discs were introduced in October 2006. The first audio-only release was made in March 2008.The first mass-market Blu-ray Disc rewritable drive for the PC was released by Sony on July 18, 2006. It recorded both single- and dual-layer BD-R as well as BD-RE discs and had a suggested retail price of US $699.

Sales of Blu-ray disc

Blu-ray Disc began making serious strides as soon as the format war ended. Nielsen VideoScan sales numbers showed that with some titles, such as 20th Century Fox's Hitman, up to 14% of total disc sales were from Blu-ray, although the average for the first half of the year was around 5%. Shortly after the format war ended, a study by The NPD Group found that awareness of Blu-ray Disc had reached 60% of U.S. households. In December 2008, the Blu-ray Disc of The Dark Knight sold 600,000 copies on the first day of its launch in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A week after launch, The Dark Knight BD had sold over 1.7 million copies worldwide, making it the first Blu-ray Disc title to sell over a million copies in the first week of release. According to Singulus Technologies AG, Blu-ray is being adopted faster than the DVD format was at a similar period in its development. This conclusion was based on the fact that Singulus Technologies has received orders for 21 Blu-ray dual-layer machines during the first quarter of 2008, while 17 DVD machines of this type were made in the same period in 1997. And the other key equipment supplier for optical disc Anwell Technologies Limited had
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shipped its Blu-ray disc production equipment to Frankfurt for the largest trade show in the world MEDIA-TECH Expo in May 2008 and they received new order for the Blu-ray production line also. According to GfK Retail and Technology, in the first week of November 2008, sales of Blu-ray recorders surpassed DVD recorders in Japan. According to the Digital Entertainment Group, the total number of Blu-ray Disc playback devices (both set-top box and game console) had reached 9.6 million by the end of 2008. According to Swicker & Associates, Blu-ray Disc software sales in the United States and Canada were 1.2 million in 2006, 19.2 million in 2007, and 82.4 million in 2008. Some commentators have suggested that renting blu-ray will play a vital part in keeping the technology affordable while allowing it to move forward.

Features of Blu-ray disc

While Blu-ray player prices fell below $100 during the 2009 Christmas holidays, more movies on DVDs were sold because Blu-ray discs will not play on standard DVD players. Bluray discs are usually priced $10 more than DVDs but do not cost much more to produce. In an effort to increase sales, studios are releasing movies in combo packs with Blu-ray discs and DVDs as well as "digital copies" which can be played on computers and iPods. Some are released on "flipper" discs with Blu-ray on one side and DVD on the other. Other strategies are to release movies with the special features only on Blu-ray discs and none on DVDs. Blu-ray faces competition from new technologies that allow access to movies on any format or device, such as Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem.

Laser and Optics

Blu-ray Disc uses a "blue" (technically violet) laser, operating at a wavelength of 405 nm, to read and write data. The diodes are InGaN (Indium Gallium Nitride) lasers that produce 405 nm photons directly, that is, without frequency doubling or other nonlinear optical mechanisms. Conventional DVDs and CDs use red and near-infrared lasers, at 650 nm and 780 nm, respectively.The blue-violet laser's shorter wavelength makes it possible to store more information on a 12 cm CD/DVD-size disc. The minimum "spot size" on which a laser can be focused is limited by diffraction, and depends on the wavelength of the light and the numerical

aperture of the lens used to focus it. By decreasing the wavelength, increasing the numerical aperture from 0.60 to 0.85, and making the cover layer thinner to avoid unwanted optical effects, the laser beam can be focused to a smaller spot. This allows more information to be stored in the same area. For Blu-ray Disc, the spot size is 580 nm. In addition to the optical improvements, Blu-ray Discs feature improvements in data encoding that further increase the capacity. TDK was the first company to develop a working scratch-protection coating for Blu-ray Discs. It was named Durabis. In addition, both Sony and Panasonic's replication methods include proprietary hard-coat technologies. Sony's rewritable media are spin-coated, using a scratch-resistant and antistatic coating. Verbatim's recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs use their own proprietary hard-coat technology, called ScratchGuard.All Blu-Ray Disc media are required by specification to be scratch-resistant. DVD media are not required to be scratch-resistant, but since development of the technology, some companies, such as Verbatim, implemented hard-coating for more expensive lineups of recordable DVDs.

Ongoing Development
Although the Blu-ray Disc specification has been finalized, engineers continue to work on advancing the technology. Quad-layer (100 GB) discs have been demonstrated on a drive with modified optics and standard unaltered optics . Hitachi stated that such a disc could be used to store 7 hours of 32 Mbit/s video or 3 hours and 30 minutes of 64 Mbit/s video. In August 2006, TDK announced that they have created a working experimental Blu-ray Disc capable of holding 200 GB of data on a single side, using six 33 GB data layers. Also, behind closed doors at CES 2007, Ritek revealed that they had successfully developed a High Definition optical disc process that extends the disc capacity to ten layers, which increases the capacity of the discs to 250 GB. However, they noted that the major obstacle is that current read/write technology does not support the additional layers. JVC has developed a three-layer technology that allows putting both standard-definition DVD data and HD data on a BD/(standard) DVD combination.In January 2007, Hitachi showcased a 100 GB Blu-ray Disc, consisting of four layers containing 25 GB each. Unlike TDK and Panasonic's 100 GB discs, they claim this disc is readable on standard Blu-ray Disc drives that are currently in circulation, and it is believed that a firmware update is the only requirement to make it readable to current players and drives.
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Variants Mini Blu-ray Disc

The "Mini Blu-ray Disc" is a compact 8 cm (~3 in)-diameter variant of the Blu-ray Disc that can store approximately 7.5 GB of data. It is similar in concept to the MiniDVD and MiniCD. Recordable (BD-R) and rewritable (BD-RE) versions of Mini Blu-ray Disc have been developed specifically for compact camcorders and other compact recording devices.

Blu-ray Disc recordable

"Blu-ray Disc recordable" refers to two optical disc formats that can be recorded with an optical disc recorder. BD-R discs can be written to once, whereas BD-RE can be erased and re-recorded multiple times. The current practical maximum speed for Blu-ray Discs is about 12. Higher speeds of rotation cause too much wobble for the discs to be read properly, as with the 20 and 52 maximum speeds, respectively, of standard DVDs and CDs.Since September 2007, BD-RE is also available in the smaller 8 cm Mini Blu-ray Disc size. On September 18, 2007, Pioneer and Mitsubishi codeveloped BD-R LTH ("Low to High" in groove recording), which features an organic dye recording layer that can be manufactured by modifying existing CD-R and DVD-R production equipment, significantly reducing manufacturing costs. Unlike the previous releases of 120 mm optical discs Blu-ray recorders hit the market almost

simultaneously with Blu-ray's debut.Blu-ray (not Blue-ray) also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVDR, DVDRW, and DVD-RAM rely on a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the

name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup unit. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser , which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB. Recent development by Pioneer has pushed the storage capacity to 500GB on a single disc by using 20 layers.

Conclusion
Blu-ray is currently supported by about 200 of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer, recording media, video game and music companies. The format also has support from all Hollywood studios and countless smaller studios as a successor to today's DVD format. Many studios have also announced that they will begin releasing new feature films on Blu-ray Disc day-and-date with DVD, as well as a continuous slate of catalog titles every month.