Daisuke Papipupipu’s Technology Guide

Many people still remember the intense format war between the VHS and the Betamax that occurred during the 1970’s and 1980’s where JVC’s VHS successfully won. Sony, with losing market share formally accepted the defeat by having a contradicting introduction of a Sony VHS system. Recently, there was the same kind of format fight, but this time around, it happened between high definition discs. This fight was occurring between Toshiba’s HD DVD and Sony’s Blue-Ray Disc. In the beginning, the HD DVD had an advantage over the Blue-ray disc, but this trend started to decline after the introduction of the Play Station 3 that includes a blue-ray disc player. This was further intensified in February 2008, when Toshiba announced to the public that the production of HD-DVD players under Toshiba would stop by March 2008. This was officially the end to the format war between the HD DVD and the blue-ray disc. There are many reasons to this decline in the HD DVD where the blue ray had many advantages. One of the major advantages of the blue-ray disc was the higher capacity of storing data. During the recent format war, both sides were fighting to increase the capacity of the discs, but for initial engineering reasons, the HD DVD was easily defeated by the other format. Most blue-ray discs at the time were capable of keeping 50 GB of memory while the HD DVD was only 30 GB. Many third party electric companies also started to invest on the research of the discs to increase the capacity. During this time period, Toshiba introduced a 51 GB HD DVD prototype to compete with the 50 GB capacity of the blue-ray. However, many reviewers believed that this disc format would not go into production for technical problems. After this, as stated before, the third party developers started to introduce blue-ray disc formats in higher capacities. One of the most prominent ones was the 200 GB prototype of TDK. By having this, people were able to view the extensive capabilities of this type of disc format. About a year after this, Hitachi also created a high capacity blue-ray disc, dubbed at 100GB. According to the company, this new prototype, unlike the 51 GB HD DVD, is nearer to production, requiring only a few updates over current blue-ray discs. At this point, it is clear that the HD DVD format had a significantly lower capacity compared to the blue-ray discs. As stated before, the direction of the blue-ray discs completely changed after the PS3. This happened since the Play Station 3 had a cheap, high quality blue-ray disc player already installed. By knowing this, it is easy to assume that PS3 owners would buy blue-ray over the HD. For this reason, blue-ray sales gradually increased surpassing the sales of HD DVD’s. This introduction of the gaming console, as a result, led to a turning point to Sony’s format, creating a huge advantage over the HD DVD. At the end, Sony’s blue-ray disc format clearly defeated the HD-DVD, ending the format war in a similar way as the Betamax vs. VHS.

Information from: www.wikipedia.org

Filed under: Disc Technology and tagged Betamax, blue ray, discs, DVD, format war, HD DVD, Hitachi, JVC, Play Station 3, PS3, Sony, TDK, Toshiba, VHS, war