Blue Ray

[jbc]

I am out shopping for an external Blue ray drive for my PC. I have enountered a lot of combo drives that will also support CD, DVD and DVD DL. I thought that in order to have a blue ray drive the maker would have to take out the ray emitter that reads the disks as the ray is red on CDs, DVD and DVD DLs where for blue ray the ray is just that its blue. Can you really have multiple rays in one drive? Is there something that I am missing?

 

[JeffO]

Yes, there are multiple rays in one drive.

 

[Yami]

AFAIK internally the drives have multiple lenses and swap them to read different disc formats. Though I see no reason there can't be multiple emitters (inside of optical drives nowadays tend to have a lot more space than they used to), so I may be wrong.

 

[KSoD]

Umm yeah. The PS3 can do Blu-Ray and DVD. So why wouldnt a drive for a PC not be able to do it as well? Considering the PS3 was the first with the technology, and it has only gotten better since.

AFAIK, the Blu laser can read all the different formats just fine without having to replace a single thing. It is the burning laser that you would need both Blu and Red in order to burn both types.

 

[jbc]

What does it mean when the store says the drive supports blue ray? Does this mean that the drive can read blue ray or not?

 

[KSoD]

I would think that means that it is a Blu-Ray drive. Cant support Blu-Ray unless it is Blu-Ray.