The Blu-ray Disc Founders group said the physical format for the read-only version of Blu-ray Discs is complete, so manufacturers can begin preparing to produce discs. Players and discs are not expected to be available until late 2005. Other aspects of the read-only version, such as which codecs to support, have to be determined. Rewritable Blu-ray Discs and recorders are already available in Japan from Panasonic and Sony.
Blu-ray Disc, and rival format HD-DVD, are considered next-generation DVD technologies and are based on blue lasers. Current DVD technology is based on red lasers. The blue-laser technology will allow greater storage capacities, up to 50GB for dual-layer rewritable disks, compared with 4.7GB on current DVDs.
The two blue-laser formats are incompatible, but both are compatible with current DVD formats.
The Blu-ray Disc Founders group consists of 13 member companies: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp Electronics, Sony, TDK and Thomson.
Blu-ray Disc Founders has been working to add support from companies by opening up its membership ranks.
All this talk of using blue lasers begs the question, "why didn't they use them to start with"?
Perhaps we should just all wait a few more years for the UV version to come out rather than promote the churn.