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If you are about to go to Fortress to buy a DVD player, you might want to think about it again.

For those of you who just bought a DVD player, I don't know how to break this to you gently, but DVD is dead.

Even by tech years, DVD has led a relatively short life.

Just when most people are looking to replace CD players with DVD players, along comes Blu-ray technology that threatens to make DVD players obsolete.

Blu-ray is a new optical disc standard with a blue laser rather than the red laser in DVD players. The standard was developed collaboratively by Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson Multimedia to avoid competing standards, as is the case with DVD recording technology.

Conspicuously absent from this impressive list is Toshiba, the main creator of DVD.

Blu-ray's storage capacity is enough to handle a continuous backup copy of most people's hard drives on a one disc.

The format boasts a capacity of 50 to 90 gigabytes and might not be backward-compatible to DVD systems, thus making existing DVD players obsolete.

Blu-ray discs will not play on CD and DVD players because they lack the blue-violet laser required to read them. If the appropriate lasers are included, Blu-ray players will be able to play the other two formats.

Some manufacturers, such as Sony, might consider including both lasers to be able to read CD and DVD formats though the capability will come at considerable cost. The prototypes shown by Panasonic, Philips and Sony were not backward compatible though.

The standard is also being touted as the replacement for recordable DVDs.

The blue laser has a 505-nanometre wavelength that can focus more tightly than the red lasers used for writing DVDs, so more data can be squeezed on the same 12cm space. Similar to rewritable DVD formats, Blu-ray uses phase-change technology to enable repeated writing to the disc.

The first products will have a 27 GB single-sided capacity, 50 GB on dual-layer discs. Single-side Blu-ray disks can store up to 13 hours of standard video data, compared with a single-side DVD's 133 minutes.

Data transfer speed is 36 megabytes per second, which is fast enough for high-quality video recording. The discs come in cartridges, unlike CDs and DVDs.

Japanese gadget magazines described the format as a kind of DVD-on-steroids, which is an incorrect description because as far as I can tell from the specifications on Matsushita's Web site, it is a completely different product.

According to the New Scientist, licensing for manufacture will begin in a few months and Blu-ray products could hit the shelf early next year. I find that hard to believe because most new technologies take about 12 to 18 months to launch commercially. I could not find confirmation from Sony or Philips in Hong Kong.

The most puzzling thing about Blu-ray is it will almost certainly kill recordable DVDs, which are only just starting to sell.

Panasonic, Philips and Pioneer recently launched competing recordable DVD devices, each subscribing to one of the three rival DVD recordable formats.

Panasonic supports DVD-Ram, Pioneer DVD-RW and Philips DVD+RW.

I have written about the differences of these battling standards many times. The point is none of the three DVD recordable formats can hold a candle to Blu-ray. Each can store only 4.7 GB on a single-side DVD, television recording time is only one hour in best quality mode and two, three or four hours with compromised quality.

Data transfer rate at around 10 Mbps is not fast enough for high-quality video.

Blu-ray beats it hands down so that is why it is puzzling why companies such as Panasonic, Philips and Pioneer with clear vested interests should join with the rest to develop the new standard.

Well, whatever their reasons may be, it is only good news for the consumer because it puts an end to people wondering if a DVD disc is going to work with a certain player or if you can play a DVD recorded on your PC.

So the verdict is: if you are buying a DVD player - go ahead.

You can use it for another two years or more and, more importantly, you can start enjoying it now.

If you are thinking of splurging HK$15,000 on a DVD-recordable system - stop.

As much as I hate to make this recommendation, hang on to the venerable VCR until Blu-ray recordable systems come along.

Got a gadget idea? Drop Carolyn a line at carolyn@scmp.com. 




DVD has a few years despite Blu-ray bushwacking