New Technology TV

Although many people may be unaware of it, we're in the middle of a battle between two types of technology that will be remembered for years to come. This battle is basically a format war between Toshiba's HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-ray high definition DVD formats. Both formats are capable of storing an entire movie in HDTV format on an individual disc the same size as a standard DVD or CD, and use blue laser technology to accomplish this. Even though the two formats use similar technologies they're incompatible in the sense that Blu-ray disc players can't read HD-DVD discs and HD-DVD players can't read Blu-ray discs. The fact that both formats accomplish the same thing, were released on the market at nearly the same time, and that the winner has the potential of making so much money for the company that introduced it, has led to a knock down drag out fight for control of the high def DVD market. Both formats have attempted to gain supremacy through tactics like integrating their players with popular video gaming consoles, giving away free movies, and lowering prices on players.

Now it appears that Blu-ray is the favored format of the two. Blu-ray discs have been outselling HD-DVD discs by a margin of over two to one since the beginning of the year. This is surprising in many ways including the fact that Blu-ray players tend to cost about twice what HD-DVD players cost. On the other hand, the success of Blu-ray is unsurprising when you look at the fact that most of the major movie studios support Blu-ray exclusively for releasing movie titles. Because of this second aspect of the situation, there are just more Blu-ray titles to buy than there are HD-DVD titles.

There are also a number of technological reasons for Blu-ray's superiority. Basically, Blu-ray technology is able to pack a lot more data onto a single disc than HD-DVD technology can. It's possible to store twenty five gigabytes of data on one side of a Blu-ray disc, while an HD-DVD disc will only store fifteen gigabytes on one side. That adds up to as much as fifty gigabytes per Blu-ray disc versus only thirty gigabytes per HD-DVD disc. While most casual viewers of High Definition movies aren't likely to notice much of a difference, there are number of possible advantages that the Blu-ray technology has for computing. Basically, drives that can burn Blu-ray discs will be preferable for backing up or archiving large amounts of information and HD-DVD burning drives will be less attractive. Basically, there's a good chance that if Blu-ray had never hit the scene, we would eventually see HD-DVD replaced by something like Blu-ray at some point in the future. On the other hand, it may be possible to argue that Blu-ray is redundant because the next step after HD-DVD would have been some kind of storage medium other than optical discs.

For now though, it looks like Blu-ray will in all likelihood be the winner of the high def DVD format war.