Even though most people however have CD and DVD burner drives in their computers, yous've probably bought a picture that is in Blu-ray format. Due to the cost, you'll only encounter Blu-ray drives installed on custom PCs or on higher-end machines from companies similar Dell or HP.

If you similar watching movies on your computer and you have a loftier-end monitor, and so it might exist worth the extra toll. Nevertheless, most people spend money on more expensive HDTVs and therefore nigh Blu-ray discs you'll buy today are for movies. Most Blu-ray players are stand-solitary devices or they are bundled with gaming consoles.

If y'all want to beginning using Blu-ray discs to shop large amounts of information physically, then your best option is to just buy an external Blu-ray burner online. You tin can get a decent Blu-ray burner that tin write at 14X speed for around $50 on Amazon. These cheaper ones will let you burn 25 GB and fifty GB discs. If you spend a piddling more (effectually $110), yous tin can get an external Blu-ray burner that supports BD-Xl discs, which go upwardly to a whopping 128 GBs.

blu ray disc

In this article, I'll talk well-nigh the dissimilar Blu-ray formats and some of their technical specs. Blu-ray discs are a bang-up way to quickly and cheaply backup big amounts of data that would otherwise require a actually large cloud storage programme or large external hard drive.

After I bought an HD camcorder back in 2010, I suddenly had hundreds of gigabytes of data sitting on my computer. The kickoff solution was to copy all that data to a ii TB external hard bulldoze. That worked great and I still practice that, just one of my external hard drives failed and I lost a lot of video. Storing all that data in the cloud was too expensive and slow, so I started burning Blu-ray discs.

The corking thing well-nigh discs is that they won't fail on you lot if you accept care of them. As long equally they don't get crushed, my information will be safely stored on those discs for a very long time. Information technology'due south just another style to continue your information backed upward in case of hard drive crashes, which all the same happen more often than you lot would recollect.

Another great reason to buy them is for watching your movie collection on your HDTV. If you have a Xbox One or PS4 console, you can burn your movies onto a Blu-ray disc and play them directly. This is actually a lot easier than trying to stream your content from your computer or NAS to your HDTV, which requires a gigabit connexion between all your devices.

BD-R, BD-RE and BD DL

When Blu-ray kickoff came out, there were really but ii types of discs: write and rewriteable. BD-R discs are write-only and BD-RE are rewriteable. The standard size for these discs are 25 GB and they only have ane layer. These cost about $i per disc.

bd r disc

After a while, the dual layer Blu-ray discs started to appear. Only like dual layer DVDs, these Blu-ray discs could hold double the amount of data as regular discs or 50 GB in this example. These discs are significantly more expensive at more than $two per disc.

bd r dl

A BD-RE DL (50GB and rewriteable) disc is fifty-fifty more expensive coming in at around $3 per disc. So how long does it accept to burn ane of these Blu-ray discs? Well, it all depends on the speed of your burner and the size of the disc. Here is a chart from Wikipedia:

bd drive speeds

BD-Xl TL, BD-XL QL, and BD-Twoscore DS TL

At present let's become to the newer stuff where the really big sizes start to come up in. In 2010, BD-Twoscore discs were announced and they come in two flavors: triple layer (TL) and quadruple layer (QL). A BD-Xl TL disc can hold upwards to 100 GB of data and a BD-Xl QL disc maxes out at 128 GB.

bd xl

Forth with the bigger size comes a bigger price! The BD-XL TL discs offset around $10 per disc. It doesn't seem like the QL discs ever gained any traction because I tin't even observe a place that sells them. Seems like the 100 GB discs are the about popular when talking nearly BD-XL.

BD-40 DS (double-sided) TL is some other specification that has been approved by the Blu-ray Disc Clan, which will support up to 200 GB, but it will but be cost-effective for commercial uses like information centers, cloud computing, etc.

For consumers, the most you tin become with Blu-ray is a BD-XL burner and a BD-Forty TL disc, which tin store up to 100 GB. That's still a lot of information on one disc!

Ultra Hd 4K BD-ROM

Lastly, the Blu-ray Disc Association appear at the end of 2015 that new 4K Blu-ray disc format will support Ultra Hard disk drive 4K video up to 60 frames per second. If you haven't heard nigh UHD yet, Google it.

Basically, 4K TVs are selling like crazy nowadays, but you might have come across a few that are saying to concur off until 4K UDH sets become bachelor. That's considering these new 4K TVs will support high dynamic range, which allows them to show more colors, more details, and amend highlights.

Unfortunately, these high dynamic range 4K sets aren't coming until 2016 and volition most likely be mode more expensive than your $700 Vizio 4K set. However, according to the people who have seen it, 4K with high dynamic range makes a significant difference over 1080p, whereas a lot of people say that it's difficult to see the difference between a current 4K fix and 1080p, particularly on TVs less than 65 inches in size.

Of course, you lot'll have to blow up a lot of money. In club to enjoy this awesome resolution, y'all'll demand a 4K Television receiver with high dynamic range, a native 4K Blu-ray player coming in 2016 and the new 4K UDH Blu-ray discs, arriving on March 1st, 2016.

blu ray 4k uhd

At that place are currently 4K Blu-ray players on the market, but they are not native 4K, meaning that they simply have a 1080p signal and upscale it to 4K. A native 4K role player will prepare you back at least $400 to $600 in 2016, just volition offer true 4K resolution (as long every bit you purchase the new 4K Blu-ray UHD discs too).

Hopefully, this gives you a little more groundwork into Blu-ray engineering science and where it is going. For near people, it'll apply to their movies and Tv sets, but also for those who own Blu-ray disc drives on their computers. If you take whatever questions, experience gratis to comment. Enjoy!