Sunset Boulevard: HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray

As there was once a debate between VHS and Beta, there’s now the debate between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Many of you are probably at least partly familiar with the debate, whether or not you have an HD TV or even a player which can handle one of these formats. Both formats are comparable in quality, so it’s been a little bit of a mystery which way consumers would go, when, and why. It appears as though consumers are beginning to lean heavily towards Blu-Ray, a behavior which has prompted Blockbuster to begin switching exclusively to Blu-Ray in stores in an effort to best suit their customers.

The big issue here is that there seems to be no compromise. You need a different player for each type of disc, and the price of the players makes in improbable that you would own both. Case in point, there is one dual-format player out, the LG BH100. It costs $1,200. Instead, most people pick sides – so let’s take a look at the two formats a little bit more closely.

Both formats use the same type of laser to pick up data from the discs, however the aperture of the laser differs as does the surface on the discs. HD-DVD has a pickup aperture of 0.65 and a clear plastic surface layer that is .6mm thick while Blu-Ray pickup aperture is 0.85 and, in turn, has a much thinner surface layer only .1mm thick, requiring an additional hard coating to protect the data.

That ultra-thin surface layer results in the slightly higher cost of Blu-Ray discs. The .6mm layer on the HD DVDs is the same thickness of DVDs so can use the same production facilities. These processes need to be modified to make the Blu-Ray discs. The benefit of this though, is that making that data layer closer to the surface, there is room for more layers so Blu-Ray discs can hold more data. The capacity for burned media on a Blu-Ray disc is 50GB (bigger than some people’s notebook hard drives) compared to HD DVD’s 30GB.

As the two technologies have emerged in head-to-head competition, big names in tech products and entertainment have taken sides, and you can see the full lists of them here: http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/19/blu-ray-vs-hd-dvd-state-of-the-s-union-s-division/

Regardless of who is taking which side, what is most important is the consumers – and the recent Blockbuster move signifies that Blu-Ray, despite it’s additional cost, is in the lead. According to their rental records, customers choosing to rent high-definition discs went with Blu-Ray 70 percent of the time. Why? My guess is that Blu-Ray only hits include blockbusters like Spiderman  and Pirates of the Caribbean which are hard competition to beat.

Do any of you have either HD DVD or Blu-Ray players? Which would you buy and why?

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Alex M., Movie Correspondent

Alex's column, Sunset Boulevard, published every Friday to Gather Essentials: Movies, is a weekly summary of the movie industry's biggest stories.

Alex is a film school grad working at a production company in Hollywood. She's been passionate about movies since she knew what they were and always has an opinion (for better or worse).

You can find all of Alex's Sunset Boulevard columns at gather.com/SunsetBoulevard

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