Will You Be Giving Blu-ray a Second Look?

The Blu-ray optical format is one of those things that consumers didn’t exactly embrace. Maybe they looked at the HD DVD debacle and said, "I was fooled by thinking HD DVD would stick around and won’t be fooled again!" If that’s the way you feel about it, I don’t blame you.

However Blu-ray now has tenure in the marketplace. The format specs were officially finalized in 2004, and what’s known as the BD-ROM spec was finalized in 2006 – the same year we started seeing Blu-ray players become widely available in the USA.

HD DVD officially died in February 2008 when Toshiba (the big name in that format) said they weren’t going to support it any longer. It’s been all Blu-ray ever since then. What that means is that Blu-ray has been the only widely available better-than-DVD optical format for over two years now.

Even with tenure in the marketplace, maybe you’re still not convinced to give Blu-ray a go. That’s understandable. But I have some info that may get you interested in the format again.

New enhancements to the Blu-ray format are coming soon. Namely, the BDXL specification. This means you will be able to get optical discs that will store 100 to 125GB of data per disc. Which will we see on store shelves? That’s indeterminate at this point, but it will certainly be substantially larger than the 25GB spec we have now.

With BDXL you’ll need to purchase a new burner drive – but if you’ve been holding off on buying one, good for you because now you know where to put the money.

What about the existing BD-ROM spec?

BDXL players/burners will be backward compatible with the older format, similar to the way a DVD-9 drive can read and write DVD-5 recordable discs. It also means that BDXLs won’t be able to read in previous generation BD-ROM drives.

When will BDXL be widely available?

Indeterminate because the enhancements haven’t been finalized yet – but it will happen soon. The Blu-ray Disc Association has made it clear it’s going to occur, so watch for it.

Does the upcoming BDXL spec have you interested in Blu-ray again?

Even if I could get an optical disc that could store 75GB, I’d be very happy about that because that’s very close to 16 DVD-5′s worth of data on a single disc.

What do you think? Does BDXL sound like a good idea?

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:

Brian
What will this be used for?
Hard drives are less than $0.10 per GB. Will probably be $0.05 per GB by the time this is widely available. Unless you have enormous amounts of data that you need to store and forget, they are not very useful, convenient, or cost effective compared to something like NAS. I guess it may be handy for long term off site archival storage of data.
Movies and other video content? That train left the station a few years ago. Streaming is the future. Users like it because it is fast, cheap, and easy. Copyright holders like it because it is a viable alternative to illegal downloads.
David M
It really grates me to purchase anything that supports Sony. Haven’t they stabbed their customers in the back enough times?
Brian has a very valid point. Hard drives are very cheap per gigabyte plus they are reusable which BluRay disks are not. I would much rather give my money to Western Digital or Seagate than Sony.
Besides, who needs to buy a movie on BluRay when we can download legal movies off the internet? BluRay is quickly becoming obsolete technology. Sony won this battle but will not win the war. I say good riddance to BluRay as soon as possible.
David Kennedy
Good to know, thanks. I almost bought a BluRay reader/writer for my recent build. Good reason to hold off for the new spec.
There’ll always be a place for CD-like products. The problem is, you can never count on everyone having even DVD drives. Sure, most do, but we still have to use CDs because some of our customers don’t. So I don’t think BluRay is going to take off in that area.