Blu-ray Dimensions

Panasonic 50GB Dual-Layer Blu-ray discs

It is certainly a sign of the times when a emerging technology like Blu-ray is compared to a mature technology like DVD. Many people have a hard time understanding the costs in product development and manufacturing.  Then and only then does the product line start to “bring in money”.  However that money (or revenue) is paying off the original investment in the R&D.  True profitability is not achieved until after a economy of scale has been reached.  In some cases that point is never reached.  DVD Recordable is a great example of this.  Some media manufacturers have been trying to capture the market by undercutting one another and have only succeeded in driving the price down below their costs.  This was an attempt to jump start the recordable DVD market (which it was successful at) but also made it very difficult to make any profit or recover the investment in manufacturing.

Recordable Blu-ray discs is somewhat different in that there is not a viable competing technology like DVD+R and DVD-RAM.  HD-DVD was abandoned by Toshiba and so only one format is available.  This excludes some of the more boutique optical discs like UDO and some of the Chinese formats.  In comparison to recordable DVD evolution Blu-ray has been far faster.  Perhaps that is why there is some impatience in the price decreasing in the same way DVD did.  It took recordable DVD around 5 years to mature and it was not till the last several years that prices started to decrease: sharply.

Blu-ray recordable is still developing.  At this point dual layer Blu-ray recordable discs (BD-RE) can store 50 GB of data, single side can store 25GB.  The road map looks to a 100GB disc in the near future.  All this takes capital to finance.  Essentially the technology is shrinking the method of storing the data and creating multi layers that each store more and more data.  The technology uses a different type of laser (that’s how optical discs are read). With all that it does not compare to when a DVD recorder drive was $13,000.  Yes those days (years) really did exist.  This is not where we break out into a story about walking to school in bare feet in the snow but it really is a matter of perspective.  Recordable Blu-ray is not as inexpensive as recordable DVD because DVD is a mature market.  Demand has leveled off  and despite the crazy forecasts from some manufacturing sectors, the same ones who dump product on the market because they are always wrong, prices have drifted down.

TDK 25GB BD-RE Blank Disc in Jewelcase

Blu-ray Disc Rewritable recordable discs make it possible to back up large data directories, record HD video, and store large amounts of data, music and video all on one disc. Like other recordable discs BD-RE uses phase change recording technology to make it possible to erase and write again.  A special phase change metal alloy can be switched back and forth between a crystalline phase and an amorphous phase, changing the reflectivity, depending on the power of the laser beam.  Data can thus be written, erased and re-written.  Some companies claim on upwards of 10,000 rewrites per disc with little degradation. Rewritable recordable  Blu-ray discs use the same 405nm blue laser that write once read many (WORM) recordable Blu-ray discs use. Data capacity for BD-RE is currently 25GB or 50GB.

Currently TDK and MAM-A are the only manufacturers of rewritable Blu-ray discs.  TDK is much more common and the leader in production (currently).

There are several other manufacturers of BD media including Ritek and FTI.   TDK  does OEM work so there are many “brands” out there.  Rewritable Blu-ray discs are specialized and cost more then standard recordable Blu-ray disc media.  BD-RE discs provide far greater rewritability then CD-RW and DVD+RW that top out at one hundred rewrites.

Blu-ray rewritable recordable discs offer large capacity storage for data backups and HD recording and rewriting.