DVDs face a challenge from out of the blue

A new high-speed, high-capacity video recording format appears to have gained momentum, threatening to make DVD recorders obsolete.

Blu-ray disc technology reads and records on discs much like DVD technology except that it uses blue-violet lasers instead of red lasers in optical drives. Blu-ray discs enable the recording of high-definition broadcasts, which offer better picture quality than the more widely available TV broadcasts.

This technology is seen as a big improvement on DVD because it allows for 27 gigabytes of storage on one side of a 12cm disc - the same diameter as a DVD.

DVD recorders can burn up to 4.7GB of data on one side, or about 133 minutes of video, depending on the mode of recording. The new format Blu-ray disc will store more than 13 hours of video, a giant leap indeed.

When I wrote about Blu-ray early last year, only hazy specifications of the technology were available on the Matsushita Web site. It was just a cool new technology which I thought might not make it to the shelves for quite some time.

However, things are looking up for the technology. The Blu-ray disc founders - consumer electronics giants Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony and Thomson - appear to be in a hurry to get a workable Blu-ray recorder out, probably because these same companies have so confused consumers with their different DVD recording formats that it has inhibited the growth of DVD recorders.