Welcome To Blu Ray

By Matt Simpson - Saturday, January 28, 2012

It may seem a bit late to tell people about the benefits of Blu Ray. Estimates are however, that almost 50% of households that own an HDTV do not own a Blu Ray player. You’ve seen what they can do even when looking at the displays of HDTV’s in those big box stores. They look even better when played back in your home. Blu Ray Players are the perfect complement to your HDTV. It’s not always a bad thing to be late to the game. Early adopters often pay huge premiums for devices that lack many of the features or performance of the ones that come down the line a few generations later. The prices alone make now a great time to consider upgrading that old DVD player of yours. With new models available today for as little as 60 bucks, it’s hard to justify not owning one.

Video

Instead of playing back some old DVD at 480P or trying to up convert it to a resolution that is more favorable on your TV, Blu Ray discs offer the full resolution of the current HDTV standard at 1920x1080. The resolution is very impressive but it is hardly the only benefit. Blu Ray Discs have enough space that the bitrate they are encoded in far exceeds that of DVD’s even when the resolution differences are taken into account. This means fewer artifacts and better color along with the increased sharpness of their native resolution.

Audio

Then there’s the Audio side of things. Blu Rays offer the first glimpse of lossless surround sound for movies. There are two competing standards not surprisingly developed by the two previous contenders. Dolby has their TrueHD and DTS the HD master codec. Each of these ups the ante considerably over the previous offerings as they are full bandwidth, 7.1 channel lossless compression.

Previous surround sound formats by both parties were lossy, meaning you didn’t get the full quality sound from all of the channels. This was due to the lack of space that was required for lossless files. One can think of lossless audio like a common zip file. You can compress the data, but when uncompressed it retains every single bit of the original. Add a quality home theater audio system to this and the sound will be just as impressive as the picture. 

There are even more benefits to be had. While you may have needed separate audio and video connections, modern HDMI carries the full 7.1 channel audio signal over the same cable that is already delivering the HD video.

Anything Else?

Blu Ray Players more commonly than not double as internet streamers in the home. Most don’t have the flexibility of the dedicated boxes, but as of this writing, the most inexpensive Blu Ray Player available costing only 60 dollars was able to stream Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, and Vudu.  This represents the bulk of the A list streaming sites and the more expensive models stream from even more sites. Streaming from the Internet isn’t the only option though. That same 60 dollar model had a USB port which devices could be connected to it. It was able to play a huge variety of audio and video files directly from its USB port.

If you’ve got a PC in the house or other DNLA device, most Blu Ray players that have network connections can stream audio and video over your network, some even wirelessly. There is an unfortunate trend in the Blu Ray player market to charge an exorbitant rate for the wireless attachments. Some are so high that it would be cheaper to buy a wired access point and run that in conjunction with the player itself.
In addition Blu Ray players are typically some of the best up converting DVD players, meaning even your old DVD collection will look its best when playing back on a Blu Ray Player.

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