Technology tends to be the easy gull for weak-minded shills who want nothing more than to lose themselves in the latest Disney Blu Ray this or that. When once it was the VHS tapes, then the lauded DVD, it seems we’re presented with another format. And so, because these Blu Ray ringers are packed with every special feature under the sun, we flock the nearest Best Buy, fork over our credit cards, and sigh deeply, content to be in the bosom of mass consumerism.

The DVD, some two decades ago, was the much-lauded game changer. While the hype did manage to live up to the hype — it did indeed revolutionize the home entertainment market — it was not a complete revolution. Think of it as a kind of Bolshevik revolution — it got us to a new paradigm…mostly. Nearly twenty years later, of course, now it’s the promise of a new revolution, a blue revolution that has us reaching for our wallets. Why?

Blu Ray discs are the sperm whales of the disc world. In addition to grappling with giant squids, they store and playback incredible amounts of data, photos, high-definition videos, and digital music. If you can burn it to a CD or DVD, chances are you can burn it all onto a Blu Ray. Of course, to do any burning or playing, you’ll have to completely revamp your entire entertainment center and DVD player.

On the one hand, you’ve got a standard DVD, which holds something like 5 GB of data — that’s gigabytes. That’s roughly a two-hour, standard definition movie with a bonus track or two. Basically, it’s what you get in the mail from Netflix or when you order a Red Box. This means, on the other hand, that a high-definition film, which eats up nearly five times the bandwidth, would take up nearly 5 conventional DVDs. This begs the question: if conventional DVDs and Blu Rays are both discs of approximately the same dimensions, how do you get that much more data onto the Blu Ray?

Blue lasers are the key. Yes, something so simple as the spectrum of the laser reader can unlock a phenomenal amount of capacity. Your run-of-the-mill DVD player, of course, fires out a red laser. The aptly named Blu Ray, as the name clearly states, uses a blue laser. How this suddenly utilizes five times the bandwidth of a disc is something of a mystery to this humble writer, but that’s the new revolution in a nutshell. So, flip open your wallets!

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