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Quality DVD
DVD, or "Digital Versatile Disk", has claims to be the most successful product in the consumer electronics history. Standard DVD, as opposed to the "next generation" optical disk format, Blu-ray, is essentially available in three different types, read-only, writable and rewritable.
The least sophisticated and least expensive of the three, DVD-R, allows information to be written to the disk once and only once. As such, DVD-R is an ideal format for creating permanent copies of, say, home movies or movies or video clips downloaded from the Internet, not least because it offers the highest level of compatibility with DVD players. Compatibility is an issue when choosing DVD media or DVD players, because each type of DVD is only compatible with some, but not all, players.
The competing DVD-RW and DVD+RW formats, on the other hand, can be written and rewritten hundreds or thousands of times, at least in theory. However, neither can be selectively or partially erased; the entire contents of the disk must be erased before new content can be added. DVD-RW and DVD+RW have coexisted in the market place for a long time without any sign of one taking precedence over the other. The DVD-RW format is written in multiple layers, rather than a single layer, so offers increased storage capacity.
The demise of HD-DVD has left Blu-ray as the format of choice for home entertainment. Blu-ray offers a superior viewing and listening experience to DVD, although a "Full HD" television set and a digital surround sound system are required to take full advantage of the technology. The reasons for its superiority are its resolution, or the total number or picture elements (a.k.a. "pixels") of which its images are composed and its video compression method. Standard DVD offers a maximum resolution of 720 x 480 pixels while Blu-ray offers a maximum resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels (a.k.a. "1080p"); the difference means that Blu-ray offers a clearer, more detailed image.
The true HD capability of Blu-ray should not be confused with the approximation of HD offered by upconverting or upscaling DVD players. These DVD players typically do a good job of matching the pixel output from a standard DVD to the native resolution of a Full HD television screen, resulting in better detail and colour consistency, but this is not true HD; if you compare the output from an upscaling DVD player with that of a Blu-ray player on the same HDTV you will notice the difference.
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