Have You Gotten A Blu-Ray Player Yet?

Yup, we got one when my darling husband HAD to have the PS3.

We like it a lot. Quality is outstanding. The selection of DVD's available has been ok but I am not concerned as now they will all be coming out as BluRay and pretty soon that's all there will be.

We spent $ 400 on the PS2...I think that's what it was. Worth it, IMO.

The PS had completely slipped my mind. We don't play games on TV, so I had not really thought about it. I remember reading that it produced a great hi-def DVD image. Thanks for reminding me!

Do they have writeable blue ray? I had been intending to get a read/write standard DVD machine.

I bought a Blu-Ray player a few months ago - a local store had a model very cheap so I fell for it. Mine's the Samsung BD-P1400.

The pic quality is perfect. So far I've only found 2 drawbacks - one being the price on Blu-Ray DVDs themselves (but I use NetFlix for most of my movies) and the other being the slowness of this player.

I'm not sure of others but when I power this thing on it takes a full minute before it will respond to open the drawer so I can put the DVD in and then it takes quite a while to get to the start of the movie once the disc is loaded. I haven't played with many other Blu-Ray machines so I'm not sure if these are specific to my machine or something with Blu-Ray machines in general.

Phoenix,
We, too, use Netflix for most of our movies. Although Netflix offers some titles in Blu-Ray, it seems unlikely that very many of the outstandingly good documentaries and older films that drew us to Netflix will ever be re-released in Blu-Ray. Therefore, the Blu-Ray itch is not great at our house. Regular DVDs look very good on our HD flat-screen. I have seen Blu-Ray pictures, and they are better yet, but, with our tastes in film, why bother to spend the money?

I know this is redundant and despire the fact that Toshiba's HD DVD, marketed primarilly for low price points on the players, has been supplanted by Blu-Ray (HD DVD also used a blue ray laser of a different type).

If you have a display of 42" and smaller and your are viewing it from 8 to 12 feet, you won't appreciate the blu-ray picture over an upscaler 420p standard DVD player -- I have a SONY that does upscale even t0 1080p if you use an HDMI connection. 1080p capable Blu-Ray players are still too pricey and the discs still too expensive. Dish Satellite is now broadcasting VOD in 1080p but it's going to be years before we see it as a standard, being it's lucky if you get 1080i (mis-identified as 720p as the "p" stands for progressive and all 1080i is interlaced). Progressive means the picture is scanned with the pixels in line across the screen progressively. Standard DVD's are 420p are upscaled beautifully to 1080p. However, on the screen size mentioned, you won't see any difference unless you are right on top of the screen.

I'd buy a good DVD player with upscaled but bare in mind that you do have to have an HDMI input to appreciate the improvement on screens 46" clear up to 100" (where 1080p is, of course, a remarkable difference even when too close to the screen). Sitting that close to any big screen is tantamount to sitting in the first few rows at a movie theater, so if that's your bag.

BTW, Pioneer has dropped their entire line of Plasmas, leaving only Panasonic producing the lion's share of those sets. Plasma is likely to phase out in lieu of new technology even beyond LCD. They use way too much power to boot!

I did fail to mention that one of the drawbacks of Blu-Ray has been that it show up a lot of picture distortion (grain) in the older films. Studios are now digitally removing the grain for a cleaner picture. That so, it will also remove some of the fine detail although the idea anyone would notice is doubtful. If you purchase older films, I would stick to the classics that have been restored like "Vertigo" (one of the best restorations ever), "Blade Runner" and "Metropolis."