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 disks. 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.
Talkback
Blu-ray Disc has one significant advantage over HD-DVD: it's put in a cartridge like FD. Ease of use is the key feature to make a success in digital home/car appliance market. If music CDs were delivered as cartridge-type media, they could get more popularity in music-loving drivers.
[quote]
The blue-laser technology will allow greater storage capacities, up to 50GB for dual-layer rewritable disks, compared with 4.7GB on current DVDs
[/quote]
In my opinion you can not compare the capaticity of a single layer DVD with a dual layer blue- Ray- disk.
The 4.7 GB is the capaticity of a single- Layer-DVD. With two layers a DVD is able to store up to 8,54GB of Data.
so please compare things only if it makes sence
yours mejzej