Ready... Steady... Go!

The nine companies Hitachi , LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Thomson, forming the BRD consortium, have just announced the upcoming release of the Blue Ray Disc format on the market.

Reminder: The Blue Ray Disc format , officially released in 2002, is made of a 12cm optical disc with a data capacity of almost 27 Gb, read by a highly efficient lens producing a blue laser ray.

Already considered as the true successor of DVD by many brands, this new format will allow manufacturers of Audio-Video equipment to offer a more efficient playing and storing concept than with that currently offered by the DVD format.

This license couldn’t fall at a better time, following the demonstration of a few prototypes by Sony, Samsung and Toshiba during the latest CES show. The BRD consortium will be releasing the first Blue-Ray products in 2003.