Organic HD DVDR dyes - white paper
 

Interesting WP about HD DVDR (SL+DL) organic dyes.

Hey, thanks for posting that! Very interesting.

Reading something like this makes me just that much more aggravated that Blu-ray "won" its war with HD-DVD. HD-DVD is truly a better technology than Blu-ray, from a structural and archival point of view, and its disgusting that Sony was able to essentially bribe the industry into using its crappy format.

There was a similar thread a couple of weeks ago: Was a HD DVD-RW drive ever sold?

It's such a shame that HD-DVD "lost" the way it did. :(

A similar white paper on Blu Ray technology (with lots of awesome pictures :D).
IMHO ther are two main reasons why the HD DVD format failed:
- the lack of HD-DVD burners (and those released by Toshiba, were extremely poor quality writers)
- a smaller capacity in comparison to Blu-ray
Also, according to my industry sources, the HD DVD-R media were surprisingly hard to manufacture and the quality of HD DVDR dyes left lots to be desired. The dye-based recordable media solutions are clearly not the right way to go for the blue laser formats.

As much as I like CD and DVD technology for what it's done, for the ability to flawlessly copy audio and video (i.e., no generation loss between copies, as there was with tapes), I've long said that laser technology is looking a bit dated. Consumer laser storage tech has been around almost as long as the magnetic options. For example, Laserdisc and CD-Audio are nearly as old as VHS and Betamax. While sci-fi movies of yesteryear showed us using tiny optical discs with infinite amounts of data, I just don't see that ever being a reality. And I often think people who insist "Blu-ray is the future" have been watching too many of these old movies. The imaginations of generations ago just didn't foresee either the Internet or solid-state media.

We're slowly seeing the shift of all broadcasting moving to digital transmissions -- video and audio stored as data and not modulated a/v signals. And it's slowly all turning into an on-demand scenario, rather than a pre-scheduled one. This, of course, scares the crap out of every broadcast operation and studio out there, as it means they've lost their control, which in turn explains why advertising has become so highly targeted via semi-intrusive means (keywords from emails, search histories, etc). Everything is slowly being put into the "digital cloud" (current buzz word), which people like (example: Hulu), which reduces demand for physical/tangible storage goods.

But for those who still want their own storage, advances in hard drives and solid-state (example: USB flash drives) make all discs look rather puny and dated -- and under certain conditions unsafe, as the disc is easy to damage with scratches and normal handling. With HD disc media being even more easily messed up by even the tiniest of scratches, coupled with costs that are well more than triple for DVD, it's a technology that will die as an infant. Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) is a "DVD on steroids" that is too late to market. It's really no different than Zip discs, which were "floppy disks on steroids" and largely flopped after about 5 years -- pun intended. The technology never really lasted outside of early adopters and college campuses, and I see Blu-ray going down the same path. But swap "college" for "studios" and that's that.

People may buy pre-made Blu-ray, but the love affair with next-gen recordable discs has passed. People still happily create DVDs, or have their videos converted to DVDs, but "the buck stops there" when it comes to created discs. Blu-ray will never recreate the DVD revolution we saw from 2002-2007. That revolution is also why DVD is here to last for decades, as VHS has, while Blu-ray may disappear far quicker.

That's just my educated take on the situation.

While I plan to get more involved in Blu-ray creation myself, sometime later this year, I can recognize that I'm in a minority of serious video users, as well as one of those persons who is inherently curious about new technologies and feels obligated to try them at some point.

So pepst, are you burning any Blu-ray media? :)

Not yet, and I don't know if I ever will. :D
I'm still waiting for reasonable prices of BD-R DL media.