1 | What is Blu-ray?
Blu-ray (also known as Blu-ray Disc) is the next-generation optical disc-format. With the same dimensions as standard DVDs and CDs, Blu-ray offers a superior storage-medium over DVDs. Foremost is the High Definition video, with picture quality and clarity up to five times better than DVD, making your home theatre come alive with a truly remarkable viewing capability. Allowing this unrivaled quality is the larger storage capacity, almost six times as much as DVDs.

2 | Why the name Blu-ray?
The name Blu-ray is derived from laser technology used to read the disc. DVDs are read by a red laser light, while Blu-ray is read by blue-violet laser light. Due to the differences in wavelengths of the respective colours, Blu-ray uses a much shorter wavelength, thus the laser can be focused with more precision, allowing data to be more tightly stored, so more data can fit on the same sized disc.

3 | Will Blu-ray replace DVDs?
Yes. The extensive support worldwide for this ground-breaking medium expects to see Blu-ray replace the DVD format. Seven of the eight major movie studios (Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM) have shown their support of the format buy releasing titles in Blu-ray format.

4 | What are the differences between Blu-ray and DVD?

PARAMETERS	BLU-RAY	DVD
Storage capacity	25GB (single-layer) 50GB (dual-layer)	4.7GB (single-layer) 8.5GB (dual-layer)
Laser wavelength	405nm (blue laser)	650nm (red laser)
Numerical aperture (NA)	0.85	0.60
Disc diameter	120mm	120mm
Disc thickness	1.2mm	1.2mm
Protection layer	0.1mm	0.6mm
Hard coating	Yes	No
Track pitch	0.32µm	0.74µm
Data transfer rate (data)	36.0Mbps (1x)	11.08Mbps (1x)
Data transfer rate (video/audio)	54.0Mbps (1.5x)	10.08Mbps (<1x)
Video resolution (max)	1920×1080 (1080p)	720×480/720×576 (480i/576i)
Video bit rate (max)	40.0Mbps	9.8Mbps
Video codecs	MPEG-2 MPEG-4 AVC SMPTE VC-1	MPEG-2 - -
Audio codecs	Linear PCM Dolby Digital Dolby Digital Plus Dolby TrueHD DTS Digital Surround DTS-HD	Linear PCM Dolby Digital DTS Digital Surround - - -
Interactivity	BD-J	DVD-Video