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The Difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc

On February 19, 2008, Toshiba made an official announcement that the company would no longer develop, manufacture, and market HD DVD players and recorders, effectively ending the high definition optical disc format war.

In consequence of this decision, Amazon.com put at least 30% discount on every single HD DVD title, obviously to clear their virtual shelves.

Since HD DVD/Blu-ray content did not become widely accepted in Germany yet, a friend and I didn’t know the differences between both formats. I decided to write down what I think is a) most important and b) why HD DVD could not survive against Blu-ray.

Introduction — Why two formats?

As a successor to CDs and DVDs, the HD DVD was initially designed to prevent the development of Blu-ray. It may sound crazy, but in the very early stages Blu-ray didn’t only need a more expensive, blue laser (CDs and DVDs are read with a red laser), but due to its assembly and sensitiveness it also needed a protective caddy to avoid mis-handling by the consumer. The DVD-Forum wasn’t very happy with these characteristics and enventually decided to develop the idea of a cheaper blue laser supported format.

Capacity

Both formats feature discs with a diameter of either 12cm (standard CD size) or a “Mini” version with a diameter of 8cm (like a “mini-CD”). Both formats also use blue laser light for reading — it is a common mistake that HD DVD features red laser light (there’s only one very special HD DVD format using a red laser, called “3x DVD”)!

Comparing their capacities, there’s a huge difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD — I believe this makes up for the price differences and is why Blu-ray finally won the war against HD DVD:

At the CES 2007, Ritek (a Taiwanese consumer electronics group) revealed their high definition optical disc process that extended both competing high definition formats to ten layers, increasing capacity to 150 GB for HD DVD and 250 GB for Blu-ray Disc.

As you can see, Blu-ray Discs offer far more storage capacity for HD movies or data — the best reason to opt for it in my opinion.

Conclusion

Blu-ray won, HD DVD is officially dead — for now. I’m anxious to see whether the industry will undergo another format war like the one between both of them.

What’s next? A proposed next-generation disc after HD DVD and Blu-ray is HVD, the Holographic Versatile Disc, which would hold up to 3.9 TB of information.

Now that’s really much.

Primary source: Blu-ray and HD DVD on Wikipedia.