Blu Ray DVD Players

Blue Ray Players

Let’s be clear… there’s no such things as blue ray players!  The actual term is blu ray player.  Lots of people tend to confuse the two because of what the “blu” stands for.  Blu Ray DVD Players get their name from the type of laser that reads the data on the disk.  Players use a special blue laser that is able to pick up the very dense data that is stored on the high definition disks.  The wavelength of the light is critical to allowing that much data to be stored and read from the same form factor as the older Standard Defintion DVD types.

Originally there was a very long debate about what the next format would be like for high definition media. One group of manufacturers headed by Toshiba preferred a red laser format with the product name HD-DVD. They felt this name would be more familiar to consumers and could be seen as a natural progression of the DVD format. The red laser format was also cheaper to manufacture. Unfortunately the discs themselves had a smaller capacity than blu ray media, so less could be put on each disk. Sony was the primary backer of the blu ray format and had the advantage of being able to push blu ray players as part of their very popular PS3 gaming console.

Blu Ray is simply a brand name and a play on the blue laser type that they use.  Still, all too often you see people still using the term “blue ray players” to refer to these types of machines.  So before you make the same mistake, remember that while a blu ray dvd player might be blue, there is no blue ray players at all!