About Blu-ray

The big advantages of Blu-ray over conventional DVD are the remarkable increase of video resolution, storage capacity and reading speed of Blu-ray discs:

Blu-ray disc	DVD
Storage capacity 25GB (single-layer) 50GB (dual-layer)	4.7GB (single-layer) 8.5GB (dual-layer)
Reading speed (data) 36.0Mbps (1x)	11.08Mbps (1x)
Reading speed (video/audio) 54.0Mbps (1.5x)	10.08Mbps (<1x)
Video resolution (max) 1920×1080 (1080p)	720×480/720×576 (480i/576i)
Video codecs MPEG-2 MPEG-4 AVC SMPTE VC-1	MPEG-2

Because of the decrease in prices for High Definition TV sets over the last few years, more and more people have compatible equipment to play HD content available, right in their own homes. To achieve the best experience, Blu-ray is the perfect medium. The selection of available Blu-ray titles grows every day.

Most Blu-ray disc players are backwards compatible with the DVD standard. This means that your current DVD collection doesn’t render useless all of a sudden when you decide to 'switch' to Blu-ray. You'll always be able to watch your DVD's using your brand new Blu-ray disc player.

When buying Blu-ray media over the internet, you need to be aware of the different region codes mentioned on the product pages of the different web stores we work with. Something you were probably used to already when buying DVD's (7 different regions). Blu-ray discs may be encoded with a region code as well. As you can see on the map below, the Blu-ray standard defines 3 different regions:

 Regio A/1   Regio B/2   Regio C/3