Make it smaller” has become the motto of all electronic majors of this era. A slight variation of this motto is Stuff more into it. Our technology in focus in this article falls in the later case. When Compact dics were first introduced they were viewed as something alien and from the future.
Those Compact Discs as their name suggests were convincingly compact and can carry more data than a kilogram of their predecessor. When the DVDs were introduced though they were welcomed they didn’t have the zeal equivalent to the CD magic. BDs or the Blue Ray Discs are expected to change the trend of memory storages, yet there will be stiff competition from the booming flash memory devices, which have now come with memory storages as high as 256GBs in a single stick.
Anyways these BDs will still be a trend setter with their cost effectiveness and the additional features they provide apart from just memory storage. Let’s have a look at the features that might make another magical welcome in the technology society.
First of all the most stunning fact about a Blue Ray Disc is the storage. A single BD can store up to 50GBs of data if it were a dual layered BD, 25GB per layer of a 2D disc. These discs will find massive application in the areas of Multimedia data like making Movie discs, play station 3 games and for other high-definition video storage or other multimedia data storage.
The disc is supposed to be of diameter 24cm just as a normal CD/DVD for a standard BD of single layer capacity 25GB. High definition videos of pixel resolution up to 19201080 can be stored in this disc with a frame rate of 60frames per second interlaced or 24 frames per second progressive.
The technology as the name suggests is the lower wavelength blue-violet laser usage. The conventional CDs uses a wavelength of 780nanometer, while DVD reduced this to 650nanometer red laser increasing their storage, whereas BD uses a much shorter wavelength of 405nanometer blue-violet laser enabling storage to increase as high as 6times than a normal DVD.
Spot size is the one that differentiates between a CD, a DVD or a BD. The smaller the spot size the larger the storage. This spot size is limited by diffraction and the shorted the wavelength the more accurate and hence the lesser diffraction and hence smaller the spot size. Only hence as the wavelength of the laser used decreases, we were able to increase the storage capacity of the disc.
In addition to the huge storage, there are options for writing multiple sound tracks for a video or music. All this n.1 speaker systems and the high technology diligently implemented in getting realistic sound effects will be of no use if the source doesnt support. The audio data of the source has to be written in such a way that it supports multiple tracks. With BDs this is possible in a degree that was not possible till DVDs.
As the amount of complexity of the data storage increases, the sensitivity of the disc also increases. BDs are more vulnerable to scratches. Hence Hard-Coating of the pick up surface is introduced to make the discs scratch proof. All BDs have to be hard coated.
Backward compatibility of BD ROM is also taken into account. BD-ROMs introduced earlier though can read DVDs can’t read CDs, now BD-ROMs were made with CD reading capabilities.
Hollywood has also accepted to follow BD codec and slowly replace DVDs with BDs. Most of the major music and electronic companies have started supporting BDs. Hope this new technology would soon become affordable and common and make life better.
