Slashdot Mirror
HP Backs Blu-ray Disc Technology
neutron_p writes "Finally HP announced plans to include Blu-ray Disc drives across many of its product lines, including select consumer desktop and notebook PCs, personal workstations and digital entertainment centers. They will start selling PCs equipped with Blu-ray Disc drives in late 2005. An optical disc technology, Blu-ray Disc is poised to replace current DVD technology and become the next standard for personal computing data storage and viewing high-definition movies. More than 70 of the world's leading technology and entertainment companies have committed to the Blu-ray Disc format. Recently, Sharp unveiled Blu-ray disc recorder with Hard Drive/DVD which will be introduced on the Japanese market in December."
Why did the article submitter link to test.wikipedia.org, I wonder? Here's the real article, with 5x the information on the format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Yes, the drive can read AND write the standard DVD format. It's in the article.
It's backwards compatible in the same way DVDs are compatible with CDs. You will need a new drive to read these new disks, but the new drives will contain lasers for reading CDs and DVDs as well.
If you mean backwards compatible video format, then it depends on the players hardware and not on the drive. HD-DVD has MPEG2 in the spec. MPEG2 is what DVDs use. So they will still work assuming the MPAA doesn't try to pull a fast one.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
In short, NO.
The DVD and CDRW units use a 'red' laser, where's blueray uses a (get this) blue laser.
Because of this, the whole focus/pit-size differences ensure that the units will not be able to read DVD/CDR. Though I'm sure someone will make a unit which supports both.
Technically there are some differences ...
+R media has better multisession support. With many sessions, it uses only 2 MB overhead on the disc (per session) for whatever data they use to link sessions. In contract, -R media uses much more data in the border zones. (It varies per session, but 3 sessions will have up to 132 MB of overhead.)
Most people don't know that a -R disc holds slightly more data than a +R. It's about 5.5 MB. I was astonished when I found out. Go look up the specs and you will see that this is true. This is not too relevant unless you are trying to back up a DVD that has so much data in 1 layer that it goes into this 5.5 MB limit.
Optical Issues: There are weaknesses in the design of the optical properties. The explanation is long and I really don't understand everything.