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Out of the gate, Blu-ray faltered considerably against HD-DVD in a qualitative sense. None of this had much to do with anything inherent to the Blu-ray format; prices for HD-DVD discs were perhaps slightly lower than Blu-ray, but you can easily chalk that up to aggressive marketing. It was instead down to an asterisk that Sony had left out of their talking points, and to smarter utilization of the HD-DVD storage space. The asterisk had to do with disc layers. Blu-rays did not ship with a caddy, in order to maintain a familiar form factor. A Blu-ray on Day One of release looked identical to a DVD or CD. However, the underlying reason for the caddy’s existence hadn’t been addressed; the wider aperture of the laser lens meant more precise focus and more storage space, but it also meant that the data had to reside significantly closer to the disc’s surface than for CDs, DVDs - or even HD-DVDs, which utilized an aperture only slightly wider than a standard DVD’s. This left the Blu-ray disc more susceptible to damage, but it also meant that even a single-layer, 25-gigabyte disc was more prone to both manufacturing errors and read errors, due to less wiggle room when it came to divots on the layer. This was an issue that was mostly down to Blu-ray being a new technology, and new technology will almost always produce a lower yield of usable product at first.
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