My disk is bigger then your disk...

And so it’s done, the DVD standard stands to be useless in less then a few years thanks to Sony, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Philips Electronics, Pioneer Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, and Thomson Multimedia. According to this PC World article the new technology “Blu-ray uses a blue laser to record data on discs, while CD and DVD systems use red lasers. Blue lasers have a shorter wavelength--405 nanometers compared to around 650 nanometers on DVD systems--and that means the laser beam can be focused onto a smaller area of the disc surface. In turn, this means less area is needed to store one bit of data and so more data can be stored on a disc.”

The end result is more data storage which comes close to being 30 GB. The author of the article Martyn Williams continued by saying “Recording is done in the MPEG-2 format, and the 23GB disc can store two hours of high-definition video at maximum quality, or four hours of standard-definition digital broadcasting. Up to 16 hours of lower quality analog terrestrial broadcasting can be stored.” All of which is great, luckily Sony is only planning to deploy this new media in Japan.