Okay...So I'm probably a little behind the times compared to most of you here.

I mean...We've only had a DVD Player for a couple of years!

We Senior Citizens hate to part with the old stuff unless we absolutely have to,
ha ha ha!

My question is...what the heck is BLU-RAY?

I've HEARD about it, but don't know what it is.

If you have a high definition television, it's a disc format for high definition movies. Just like your DVD player gives you quality standard defintion movies, and while back in the day you'd have used VHS.

A competing format to Blu-ray Disc is HD-DVD... which basically is the same concept, but is supported by a different selection of companies.

It is called blu-ray because it uses a blue laser to read the CD sized disk. Blue laser is finer and so can be more precise to read the finer and highly compact information on a high resolution movie disk.

Personally, I prefer the HD-DVD name, as it also uses a blue laser, but make more sense if you think of it as "High Definition DVD".

[Link: en.wikipedia.org]

In essence Blu-ray is a disk that is the exact same physical size as DVD but that can contain more then 5x the content. The mmost important thing to know is that every BD (short for Blu-ray Disk) player can play DVDs but that you need a BD player to play BDs.

More technical:

in order to do HD properly (that has roughly 6x the detail) something that could hold more and spit it out faster was needed. BD uses a blue laser instead of a red one for DVD and infrared for CD as well as having the data layer much closer to the surface (.1mm for BD, .6mm for DVD and 1.2mm for CD) a BD can hold 25GB on a single layer disk and 50GB on a dual. A BD also has a faster data rate 54mbps. When the BD movie format was created they also made some other improvements, they added two newer video CODECs (VC-1 and AVC to DVDs MPEG-2 that are more efficient) and they also added more audio formats including LPCM that is the original digital sound used to get the DD and DTS as well as DTHD (Dolby True HD) and DTS HD MA (Master Audio) that are lossless compressions. They also added BD-J so that studios can use cooler menus.

In conclusion: in essence a BD is a movie disk like the DVD but the movies on them have better pictures, better sounds and sometimes better menus.

Thanks for the info, everyone!