Blu Ray
 

I have never in my life seen a Blu ray movie & I don’t own a Blu ray player.

Are Blu ray movies really so fabulous? (They’re expensive, this I know.)

I own & rent regular DVDs & they look great to me.

Thoughts?

Re: Blu Ray
 

Yeah, they're better. Particularly for sound and interactive menu options and stuff.

When I saw DVD for the first time I was kind of unimpressed...until I went back and watched VHS again after. Turns out my memory was "filling in" a lot of the missing detail. A similar thing happens with Blu-ray, though I think the jump to DVD was a lot larger.

They're getting close in price, anyway, relatively speaking. When I buy a new film it's pretty much always in Blu-ray. Costs have come way, way down.

You're not alone🙂 Up until a couple of years ago I hadn't seen a Blu Ray either...but I do have a Blu Ray Player. Of course one needs an HD TV to be able to see a Blu Ray in it's full effect.

I don't particularly love Blu Ray as they can look too sharp, which to me kind of looks fake. Of course it depends on the Blu Ray movie and especially the HD or UHD quality of the TV.

Re: Blu Ray
 

I do have an HDTV. If I owned a Blu ray player I would definitely try it out. But then I would have 2 types of DVDs. Life getting too complicated. :)

@Yoda, just realized this minute that this thread is in the wrong place. Thanks for moving it so quickly - I was about to ask you to. :)

Ha🙂 I hear ya! What's weird is that I have a Blu Ray Player and use it every night to watch movies, but I haven't watched a DVD or Blu Ray movie since Covid started...that's because my library is locked down. I don't miss watching movies on disc, though I still own some, but not many.

Something else that would complicate it for me is that I must have a multi-region DVD player. So if I bought Blu ray movies, I would need a 2nd DVD player.

I have had Blu Ray for over ten years now and it is a lot better image and audio wise if you have a good HDTV and Blu Ray player.
To get the full effect you will need a surround sound set up that can handle Dolby Digital 5.1 and up, DTS True HD and with some newer discs Dolby Atmos.
Some films can look overly sharp but that is usually down to the TV's picture enhancement modes.
They do generally take a little longer to load up and some players do enhace standard BluRay to near 4K quality if you have a UHDTV.
Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic and LG are at the forefront of the format, I myself have a Pioneer player and a Samsung HDTV and the blacks are nice and deep and colours nice and bright.
Movies like Valerian, Life Of Pi and most animations look awesome and even older movies get a bit of a lift in the format.
Sound is handled by a Pioneer receiver and Wharfedale surround speaker system.
TV is the next upgrade then the speakers ready for 4k discs. 🙂

A multi region Blu Ray player should play multi region DVD, ask the seller if it is an option. 🙂

Re: Blu Ray
 

Christ! I always wondered who still bought DVDs!

The jump from DVD to Blu Ray is massive. Huge. The quality is night and day. Especially on a great massive TV. The jump is far greater than Blu Ray to 4K in my humble opinion.

Re: Blu Ray
 

Results vary.

I have great results with Blu-Ray, but my HDTV isn't an LED TV. I am one of those weird Plasma purists still clinging to a tech that has been phased out. To me, Plasma is the clear superior technology for retaining that film-like look when playing DVD and BluRay, but there is just one problem: Plasma can't scale above 1080p. Once 4K et al. hit the scene, Plasma was kicked to the curb.

That said, the new OLED TVs look amazing, and have finally gotten to the point where the quality either equals or surpasses that of Plasma.

My point is that, depending on your TV, you might get undesired results from BluRay, such as a weird "soap opera effect," where the image comes across as looking to stagey. without proper depth of field or background blur. Personally, I find these problem to be extremely distracting, to the point that I can't properly focus on the content. Oddly, not all LED TVs have the same problems, so it's kind of a crap shoot.

Best of luck!

Quite a few of us here are collectors. I absolutely adore buying DVDs.

Good on you. I just thought most people had made the jump to Blu-Ray. It's been around 18 years now.

I made the jump to OLED a few months ago. Although I'd say that it's not as bright as LED and the motion is probably not as smooth, the overall picture quality for film content is just sublime. The Blu Ray and 1080p content looks superb. The 4k content is out of this world.

Bummed out to hear this. That's one of my hang-ups with LED, which has blurry motion compared to Plasma (which has no refresh rate - the tech doesn't work like that). If OLED has more blur than LED, I might not be able to get past that. Dang!

Check the displays out in your local store when we return to normality. Everybody's eyes are different, and it depends on the source quality too. You can also increase the smoothness settings to your liking with the truemotion effects so it's just down to taste. Overall OLED is a massive improvement to my eyes compared to LED.

As it happens I watched a DVD on it last night, which is something I rarely do as I only have a few and it looked pretty decent. Good upscaling quality.

I still hit the stores pretty regularly, and can sometimes be found ogling the OLED TVs. The ones I have seen look amazing, but they are still a bit out of my price range. As soon as my plasma dies, I will make the jump. Also, I have a toddler in the house, and she frequently puts her hands on the screen, sometimes after eating etc., so I think I need to wait until she is a couple of years older!

Count me as a weird Plasma TV enthusiast🙂

I knew there were more out there!

Yeah you gotta have rules around OLEDS! My kids aren't allowed within 4 feet of mine or I stop pocket money.

So now I’m confused. Isn’t Blu ray a dvd also? Don’t they look the same?

If I understand correctly, (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong), a Blu-ray is basically a high-definition DVD. It has a higher capacity, so it holds more information, allowing it to have better image and sound quality.

Most (maybe even all) Blu-ray players can play standard DVDs, so if you buy a Blu-ray player, you will still be able to play all of your current DVD discs on your Blu-ray player.

If you sit close to your screen then 4k/8k will make a huge difference.
The further you move away the less effect it will have and a standard HDTV will be fine.
One advantage of the new tech is less power consumption, those old plasmas eat electricity at an alarming rate as do the older LCDs.
They are also a lot lighter so a 65" plus weighs less than an old 32" plasma.
Oh they are a lot cheaper than they were too, here in the UK you can get a 50" for less than £300.

You are correct most Blu Ray players can also play DVDs.
Some can also play the now obsolete HD DVD format. 🙂

I switched to OLED a couple of weeks ago, and the difference from my old 10 (or 11) years old LCD is quite drastic. I also went from 40 to 55 inches. Even the SD material looks better because of perfect blacks and higher contrast, and proper 4k HDR material is just awesome.

I guess the TV was a little out of my price range too, but the three years no interest payment plan is feasible. Now I'd have to figure a way to buy a 4k Bluray player too.

Blu-ray (and above) is essential, in my opinion, to experience the full intention of the director and thereby view the film as it should be viewed.

DVD compromises the quality and information of the image greatly, sometimes creating visual artefacts, weird sharpness issues and an overall soft look. Of course it demands the right setup all around to truly be able to see what you are missing. There is a lot of information in the image that you will simply never see with DVD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ-RhnonZyg

At first it might be a bit of a shock. Some may find that it's "too sharp", but remember it also depends on your setup (your tv and the likes). You might also need to learn a bit about your TVs settings and what each of them does. Because suddenly, you are seeing all this insane information in the image that you are not used to, and that also means that all the little things can be seen - including if you have your sharpness setting set too high, your white balance is off and so on... often tv manufactures have standard image settings that will make your tv "pop". But they will in most cases look unnatural. That can easily be fixed though - a quick change to a "cinema mode" setting with only a few clicks will help greatly. And the next steps all depends on how deep you want to dive into it all (calibration of your tv and the likes).

There are a lot of people who hold on to DVDs because it's easy and been around for long, but also because they find the look to be "right" to them. But if you are truly a film purist, you should at least check out the benefits of Blu-ray and 4K. For one, they preserve the natural film grain, so if you like or love older films (or just films shot on film negative) then Blu-ray (and to a greater extend, 4K) will replicate that look very well. Watching a great Blu-ray or 4K disc, it can sometimes feel like watching the movie for the first time all over again.

To put it into perspective, a standard DVD has a size of 4.7 GB (gigabytes) of storage. A standard Blu-ray has 25 GB. That's more than five times the size. But it can go up to 50 GB for the larger disc. As for 4K UltraHD Blu-ray, the standard is around 66 GB, but it can go up to 100 GB. That's a lot of numbers, but just think of them as information. The bigger the container, the more information, the better quality, the closer to the actual film print/DCP. When a movie is shot today, on digital for example, you can easily end up with several Terabytes... now, 1 terabyte (TB) is 1000 GB, if that helps with perspective. I recall when watching All The Money in the World - a two hour film - that the movie file size used in the cinema was about 200-300 GB. So with DVD, all that information is pressed onto a 4.7 GB disc.

To me, when I watch films, I want to respect the film and the people behind the making of the film. I want to make sure I watch it the best possible way I can. And perhaps I am a bit more nitpicky about it than most. Sometimes I will even refuse to watch a film if it's DVD quality or less... "But MM, if the movie itself is good the quality doesn't matter all that much. It's the movie itself that counts". I can certainly see the point in that, but I have found that the more "fuzz" I make when watching a movie the greater my experience will be...

There's a reason movie-going was an "event" back in the day. It has always been something more than just a movie. I feel like I'm taking a huge dump on the director if I watch his movie on a small smartphone screen, while riding a bus on my way to work, then pause it halfway and finish the film on my way home. Stuff like that hurts my cinema heart.

I have a 65" OLED at home with a sound system capable of Atmos. I want to make sure that whether I watch Truffaut or Transformers I want to view it the best way I can. Because even though Transformers is what it is, I feel like you haven't really watched the film if you haven't watched it with a great screen and sound system. Because especially for movies like that, it's part of the experience to make sure that every surround element is placed right and every little bass response can be felt. And actually, there's a lot of drama movies too that benefits from a great sound system. Directors like Malick and Lynch, for example, care greatly about this. Their movies can really be elevated if you make sure you get everything that was intended into your own experience of the film. Malick's Knight of Cups even has a title card talking about the sound mixing, explaining how important it is to view this movie at high volume.


This is a massive ass write-up, but my point is that a lot of work is put into making a movie. A small change in the color, a tiny sound in a certain scene. Everything matters. And every cinephile knows this, I'm sure. And I definitely do not think that cinephiles have not made the jump to Blu-ray because they want to sh*t on cinema. Of course not. But if you take your time to invest in a greater viewing experience, you will also be rewarded.

They definitely do not look the same. I'd strongly recommend investing in a Blu Ray player. Sell al your DVDs and upgrade to Blu!

https://www.originalprop.com/blog/dy...en-capture.jpg

It isn't necessary to sell off a DVD collection as some Blu Ray players automatically upscale the image.
Granted the Blu Ray version will be better but if you have a huge DVD collection to replace that could end up costing a pretty packet.

I also tend to watch action movies with DTS sound rather than Dolby as the low end has more prominence.
When the time comes book a demo of a full 4k set up with surround sound and I'm sure you will want to move up.
4k Demo scenes to view...
1. The Diva singing in The Fifth Element leading into the shootout.
2. Neo and Trinity saving Morpheous from Agent Smith
3. Opening sequence of Terminator 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VZFpwlXKpg

Even on a standard stereo the sound will amaze you.
If you have a sub turn it on.
Image will be as good as your screen/monitor will allow.

I make this about $410. I don’t think here in America you would need to spend this much.

Oh there are lesser brands here that are cheaper but I personally wouldn't buy one of them.

The extra for a marque name like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, LG etc will perform better and work well with one of their own Blu Ray players.

Just book a few demos to see what one tickles your fancy then haggle on price. 🙂

Well said.

Anyways, I think DVDs are worth buying only when the title is out of stock or not avabile and you’d have to wait or buy from a secondary source.

In that case and for a good price you could buy it, like for example I got Videodrome for 3£ brand new.

If you have a bigger than 32 inch tv go blu-ray, no question about the improvement- there are a lot of remastered classics that look amazing like Gone with the Wind. However some blurays do look like straight dvd transfers so watch out (in same way some dvds are vhs transfers). I got an Xbox one x last year which plays 4K and am slowly updating my collection as they get released, How good they are depends on the effort and expense the studios gave to remastering. Flash Gordon is very impressive, I heard karate kid isn’t that good though.

You do see some funny things with HD though, for example in Moonraker Roger Moore’s stunt double is Chinese, and in From Russia with Love you notice Connery had a hairy back!