Perhaps not everyone will agree with us, but here at Gizmodo, we've officially declared Blu-Ray the winner over HD DVD in the battle to be DVD's replacement format. It's technically superior to HD DVD, has a stronger backing, is further along as far as commercialization is concerned, and as of today, even offers a "bridge" format between CD and Blu-Ray. I will hopefully get a chance later this week to outline exactly why Blu-Ray is simply kicking the ass of HD DVD, but for now, this announcement from Sony should suffice.
The announcement I'm talking about came at this year's "International Symposium on Optical Media" (ISOM), where Sony unveiled a concept to put both Blu-Ray and CD data layers on a single disc. Understandably, they're calling it "BD/CD Dual Format Disc." More after the jump.
I could get into quite a bit of technical mumbo jumbo about how the "BD/CD Dual Format Discs" are supposedly going to work, but to make a long story short, there's two variations: the first variation has both "Blu-Ray" and "CD" sides of the disc, and the second variation consists of having both "Blu-Ray" and "CD" recordable layers on the same side of the disc. The dual format discs are possible thanks to the essentially mirrored layer setup of Blu-Ray and CD.
When looking from the data side of the disc, CDs have a substrate layer, recording layer, reflective layer, then protective layer. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is setup in almost the exact opposite fashion - protective layer, recording layer, reflective layer, and substrate layer. Moreover, you can even supposedly do dual layering for your Blu-Ray side of the disc. While I'm not going to get too far ahead of Sony, I expect that it won't be long before we start seeing "BD/DVD Dual Format Discs," which would certainly spell doom for HD DVD.
