Blu-ray Technology Still Faces Obstacles

Despite the fact that Blu-ray now longer has the competition of HD DVD to contend with, this technology still faces numerous barriers to its widespread adoption.First some background on Blu-ray. For the uninitiated, Blu-ray is a video disc format that can deliver HDTV quality video and is meant to replace the older DVD format as the home media format of choice for the foreseeable future. It accomplishes this with much greater data storage capacity than the DVD thanks to blue violet laser technology that can encode information more finely. This means that a Blu-ray disc, which is the same size as a normal DVD, can store roughly five times as much data! That extra capability to store data allows the Blu-ray disc to store video with a high enough resolution to qualify as HDTV. In fact, Blu-ray is capable of delivering movies with resolutions as high as 1080p which is the maximum for the HDTV format and better than most TV services can provide.Perhaps the biggest barrier to the wide spread adoption of the Blu-ray format is the DVD format that it is meant to replace. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, there is some widespread fatigue of upgrading to new video formats. DVD has only been available for a little more than a decade and many users of DVD technology simply feel that it is too early to upgrade to a new format. The last obstacle that Blu-ray has to conquer is economic rather than technological. In a tough economy, people just aren't buying as many electronics. Devices like Blu-ray players and Blu-ray discs are far from being necessities and they are still too expensive to qualify as impulse purchases for all but the most wealthy electronics enthusiasts. For these reasons, it may be a while before Blu-ray gets the dominance that it was meant for.