Blu-Ray is an optical storage format developed by Sony and Phillips. Blu-Ray was created to store large amounts of high definition video and sound. Blu-Ray gets its name from the type of laser it uses to read and write data from and to the disc, the color of the laser is a hue of blue-violet. Due to the extreme density of these optical discs the data needs to be smaller to fit onto the disc, a blue-violet laser has a shorter wavelength than the normal red lasers used today.

Blu-Ray technology is so-named because of its use of blue laser technology in storing and reading data. Being on the shorter wavelength end of the light spectrum than the red laser used for DVD and CD technologies (405 nanometer for Blu-Ray versus 650 nanometer and 780 nanometer for DVD and CD technology), blue laser is capable of storing a much larger amount of data using the same space because of a much smaller "spot size" requirement. Blu-Ray's 405nm wavelength blue-violet laser uses an 0.85nm pickup aperture.

Single-layer Blu-Ray disks currently store 23.3GB of data, which dual-layer Blu-Ray disks are able to store 46.6GB of data.

The current DVD-5 discs hold 4.7GB of data. That means that dual-layered Blu-Ray discs are 10 times as large. That means if you have 10 DVD5 movies, you can copy them all onto to blank dual-layered Blu-Ray disc without any loss of quality. If you have the larger format DVD9 DVD movies, you can fit five of them onto a dual-layered Blu-Ray disc.

There was a market war between HD DVD's and Blu-Ray DVD's. Blu-Ray DVD's won the battle and will be the new form of media for the years to come.

The major benefit of Blu-Ray DVD's is that it is able to hold more data on one disc, therefore allowing high definition audio and video. The more data you have, the more data can be read to give a clearer picture with more color and vividness.

Blu-Ray technology will enable users to store an average of 25GB-27GB worth of data into just one layer. This is equivalent to 4 hours worth of HD video and audio. Moreover, Blu-Ray dual layer discs will have a storage capacity of up to 54GB. Research on Blu-Ray discs with up to four layers and with storage capacities of up to 200 GB is currently underway

Another benefit of Blu-Ray technology is that because data is so close together, early types of Blu-Ray discs would be contaminated by slight scratches. However, a new coating has been developed that makes Blu-Ray discs extremely difficult to scratch.

Blu-Ray is looking to make inroads into the consumer electronics market with the Blu-Ray DVD player with its Sony PlayStation. The Sony PlayStation will include a basic Blu-Ray DVD player which might spur sales of media and make it the de facto standard.

The disadvantages to Blu-Ray discs are that they are quite expensive. For instance, players are selling at about the $1,000 mark and DVD discs will be more expensive than their standard DVD counterparts. Another disadvantage is that since there are two standards, both Blu-Ray and HD, most people are sitting on the sidelines to see who the winner is. Because Blu-Ray has been developed in part with Sony, Sony has included DRM or digital rights management that will make it more difficult for people to place shift and time shift their content.

At present, two DVD movie copy applications support Blu-Ray copying: DVD neXt COPY Ultimate and DVD Cloner 6.