Blu Ray

[bryans]

Ok, I have 3 questions. First I have about 400 dvd's, so if I buy a blu ray player is the best option going to be to eventually replace every movie I own? My second question is do the current blu ray players upconvert at all? I mean do they take your regular dvd's and make them look any better at all? and my 3rd question is what are the best blu ray players right now? I know these may all be ignorant questions, but I haven't had any experience with blu ray. Anyway any info you can give me is grealty appreciated. .

[GMichael]

Hello & welcome to AR. There are many posters here with a lot of knowledge. Until they show up, I'll give you some of my input.

Q1) Best is relative, but if you mean best quality, then yes. Replacing them all would give you your best results in picture and audio quality. In reality, this may not be best for you. I bet that you have some movies that you haven't watched in years and may not watch again anytime soon. I don't see why you would want to replace those, but if you have enough cash, then the BR will be better.
Q2) Yes, BR players do upconvert, but only if you use the HDMI connection. This may or may not be an improvement based on how well your display upconverts compared to how well the BR player model you end up with does.
Q3) Sorry, I don't have all the information needed to give you a good answer on this. I use a PS3 which does a great job. Not sure if other BR players are better or not.

Hang in there. Others will give you more info.

[Woochifer]

If you buy Blu-ray, your DVD collection won't go anywhere that you don't want it to go. I doubt that most people will replace even 1/4 of their DVD collections. The reason is that the majority of the market is new releases, and frankly, most of those movies aren't worth rebuying. Library titles will generate some repeat purchases, but this won't be like the DVD, which came into the market and created a whole generation of video collectors.

I've said all along that Blu-ray will increase its market share by attrition. People whose DVD players break will replace them with Blu-ray players. People who buy Blu-ray players will simply buy their new video titles in the Blu-ray format, and only buy DVDs if a Blu-ray version is not available.

Currently, the most popular Blu-ray player is the PS3. Fortunately, it's also been one of the best performing Blu-ray players out there. It's also the most futureproof Blu-ray player on the market because new features and performance improvements get implemented via firmware updates constantly.

All Blu-ray players will upconvert to 1080p (most standalone models will also downconvert to lower resolutions) via HDMI. However, the quality of the upconversion has been subpar with the first generation models, and the second generation models (most of which are still on the market) still don't measure up to the best upconverting DVD players.

The new third generation Panasonic models supposedly perform much better with DVDs. Also, with the newer system software, the PS3 now passes all of the HQV DVD benchmark tests (earlier versions had performed poorly on other DVD benchmark tests).

I use a PS3 and its DVD playback is much better than my old Denon DVD player (which also lacked HDMI, upconverting, and progressive scan).

[pixelthis]

Ok, I have 3 questions. First I have about 400 dvd's, so if I buy a blu ray player is the best option going to be to eventually replace every movie I own? My second question is do the current blu ray players upconvert at all? I mean do they take your regular dvd's and make them look any better at all? and my 3rd question is what are the best blu ray players right now? I know these may all be ignorant questions, but I haven't had any experience with blu ray. Anyway any info you can give me is grealty appreciated. .

You're DVD'S will last awhile, until you can't stand them anymore.
Newer movies tend to "upconvert" better, but nothing beats HD, especially BLU.
I have decided to replace my "favs", also to get bargains when I see them.
But no matter what you do to a DVD it will always be SD.
I bought moonraker off of VOD the other night, it started out in SD for some reason,
but after I checked the weather and switched back the HD popped on.
The difference was nothing short of amazing.
Your old DVD collection and what to do with it might seem an issue now, but watch HD for awhile, and you wont want to spend a second watching anything in SD.
For me its not a question of replacing my DVD'S, but when and how