3 Things to Consider Before Buying a Blu Ray Player

Blue Ray Vs. DVD Upconversion
So you’ve purchased the HDTV and you are eager to see your movies in the Blue-Ray format! This sounds like a fun thing every HDTV owner must try before they die, but before you buy it you may need to understand exactly what you are getting.

Here’s a good caution list (if not a checklist) to see if you must have the Blue Ray player.

1. Your HDTV is not a 720p set.
720p is a picture quality that is slightly better than to 480p (analog with progressive scan) quality. At this picture quality, you would see very little difference between the Upconverted DVD and Blue Ray formats. Once your gathered an expensive collection of Blu Ray discs you’d want nothing more than to upgrade your HDTV.

2. You Don’t Mind Black Bars

For decades, movies have been altered to “full screen” or “Formatted to fit your TV screen”. Now, the 16x9 revolution has forgotten the “full screen” concept entirely. Blue Ray and DVD movies are never changed to be “full screen” for the 16:9 viewer, even though almost every up-converting DVD player has a “zoom” feature to address this, but I have yet to find a Blue Ray player that has that simple feature.

Many HD enthusiasts will tell you seeing the movie in the “original theater aspect ratio” is ideal anyway, but HBOHD, ShowtimeHD, TNTHD, etc., eliminate those black bars found on the ‘extra wide’ (2:35 and 2:40) aspect ratios. Would you mind paying more to have the black bars so you can see the “complete picture”?

3. You Don’t Expect Life-Like Images From Film

I remember seeing the beautiful HDTV images piped into the Best Buy store. Then I remember the sales associate telling me ‘the 720p was good enough because most television broadcasts are actually in 720p and that movies aren’t shot in HD. Movies are shot using film that is inferior to the HD standard.’ These statements are both true. Only a handful of movies claim to be shot in HD, “Fahrenheit 911”, “Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle” come to mind), and the 1080p shows grainy images in even the highest production films (such as “Pirates of the Caribbean – At World’s End”. (I should note that some TV shows such as Heroes was shot and provided on Blue Ray with stunning 1080p quality.)

The Blue Ray industry would have a lot to brag about if movies looked as good as the NFL on CBS or those full-screen ‘fish shows’ displaying on HDTVs throughout the stores, but that’s not what they can offer.