The best selling Blu-ray DVD on Amazon.co.uk as of this writing is 300. The movie 300 is based on King Xerxes and his trying to follow through with his fathers’ (Darius) plans in conquering the Hellenic city-states; included in that list is Sparta. King Leonidus, his band of 300 Spartans and a few allies will try to thwart the Persian army, even though the Persian army is in the hundred-thousands.

The next best selling Blu-ray DVD at Amazon.co.uk is Casino Royale, the latest installment in the James Bond series. For fans that have long been a fan of the franchise, Casino Royale offers some jokes that only you will understand. For instance, Mr. Bond wins his Aston Martin at a game table, and when the bartender questions him on his preference of his martini being, “…shaken or stirred,” he bitterly replies, “Do I look like I give a damn?”.

Another Blu-ray DVD that has been selling very well is the latest installment of the Superman series, Superman Begins. Believing that hiss home planet Krypton might still exist, Superman was gone in space for five years. When he found out it was a lie, he comes back to a completely changed Earth. Terrorism became rampant, and Lois Lane got married, started a family, and wrote a paper entitled ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’ that won the Pulitzer Prize. Lex Luthor is also back and is planning to use a stolen piece of kyptonite that will grow a brand new island that he plans to control.

Lastly, another best seller that has been doing very well is the final installment of X-Men; X-Men: The Last Stand. A place called Worthington Laboratories, while using the genes of a very powerful mutant child, develops a serum that destroys the ‘mutant X gene’ for good. Magneto and his band of renegade mutants form an army and march onto Worthington Laboratory, no guarded and heavily fortified, located on Alcatraz Island.

The way Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disks are able to store so much more data than regular DVD’s is due to a blue-purple laser that has a considerably smaller wave length to read and write data from the disc. Since the laser is smaller, it takes up less space of the disk when recording data, and it’s probably where the company came up with “blue ray” as its company name.

There has been an on-going debate as to which is better, and also a rivalry between the two companies as to which is the best replacement to the older DVD’s. For the capacity category, the result is obvious: Blu-ray blows away the competition. HD-DVD disks have 15 GB maximum capacity per side, while Blu-ray disks offer 25 GB per side.

When a Blu-ray or HD-DVD is being recorded to, the high-powered, blue-purple colored laser burns pits on the disc surface. The areas on the disc that are burned with data are called ‘pits,’ while the areas on the disc that were not burned are called ‘lands.’ When a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD disc is being read, the blue-purple laser comes out and is reflected on the disc surface. When the laser reaches a pit it is reflected back with a lower intensity, while when it hits a land the laser is reflected back with a higher intensity. This is the process how the laser on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player can tell if an area is a pit or a land: the intensity of the laser reflected back by a land is higher than the amount reflected by a pit.