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Choosing a Blu-Ray Player

This is meant to serve as an exhaustive guide that will provide you with everything that you need to not only make educated decisions in buying a blu-ray player, but also in ensuring that you get the most out of it once it’s at home, out of the box,  and plugged in to your television.

To ensure that the guide is accurate and up to date, it will forever remain a work in progress.  If you see anything in this guide that you feel is innacurate, or perhaps something that you feel is important but we have failed to mention, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we’d love to hear from you.

Picture Quality

Obviously the first thing to consider, and likely one of the main things drawing you to the idea of purchasing a Blu-ray player, is picture quality. Blu-ray discs offer an amazing, vibrant, crystal clear image, but remember that your TV will play a big role in determining how much of that amazing image you actually get to see. Blu-ray discs are encoded at 1080p, that is to say that they have a resolution of 1080 horizontal pixels and display them in a progressive format (as opposed to interlaced as seen on HDTV channels). With a resolution of 1080p, you are seeing over 2 million pixels per frame. Compare that to a DVD at 480p, which offers about one sixth the number of on screen pixels.

Most Hollywood movies are shot at 24 frames per seconds, the same frame rate at which Blu-ray discs are mastered. Look for a Blu-ray player that can match this with an output of 1080/24p. Of course, be sure that your TV can handle this; many high-definition televisions on the market require a 1080/60p output from the Blu-ray player, so it does makes sense to choose a Blu-ray player that offers an output in both formats. This will ensure that, if at some point during the life of your Blu-ray player, decide to buy a new high-definition television, you’ll know that the Blu-ray player and the new television will be compatible.

Resolution isn’t the only thing to influence picture quality. The picture quality that you see in a video is a combination of two things: resolution of course, but also bit rate. What is usually the case in the home theatre industry is certainly the case with bit rate; more is better.  Video quality is a result of the speed at which the information can be processed. The only way to process more information is to have a higher bit rate. DVDs hit their bit rate ceiling at roughly 10 megabits per second (Mbps). Blu-ray discs, on the other hand, are capable of bit rates up to an amazing 40 Mbps. This means that the data has to undergo much less compression before being displayed on your television which makes it much more true to the original source. As cliche as it might sound, this truly does allow you to see the image as it was intended to be seen.

When shopping for a Blu-ray player, you may want to consider buying one Blu-ray title and using it as a test disc on all players that you are considering. That way, you’ll be able to base your decision on the image that the Blu-ray player is able to produce when given an input that is consistent to that which you’ve given all Blu-ray players that you’re considering. Movies are filmed with all sorts of different filters, styles, and effects; you don’t want your purchase decision to be influence by the artistic vision of the director who’s film happend to be playing while you were shopping.

Backwards compatibility

This really shouldn’t be a concern for you when shopping for a Blu-ray player, but it is a good thing to know. At this point, all Blu-ray players on the market are backwards compatible in the sense that they will be able to play any of your existing DVDs. A nice thing to know when considering the jump to Blu-ray is that, in addition to playing your DVDs, a Blu-ray player will actually breathe new life into your DVD collection with built in upscaling. Look for a Blu-ray player with 1080p upscaling which is, at this point, more or less standard, but double check as some players still upscale to only 1080i. Although, even at 1080i you’ll see a huge improvement in the image quality from your DVDs.

Sound Quality

As any audiophile will quickly point out; picture quality is only half the battle. This is an area where Blu-ray certainly does not dissapoint. In fact, the opinion has been offered by many that the biggest improvement seen upon making the transition from DVD to Blu-ray was not in the picture quality, but the incredible sound quality which Blu-ray is able to capture from the source and deliver to viewer audience.

In order to truly take advantage of the audio quality that the Blu-ray format is able to produce, you want to look for a player that supports Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD. For amazing sound qualty, delivered to you directly from the master audio tracks in the way that the filn’s director had originally intended, look for the lossless formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA (Master Audio). Of course, you’ll need to ensure that your receiver is compatible with these formats, especially if your Blu-ray player doesn’t do the actual decoding, instead passing it through bitstream via HDMI 1.3. Of course, if you don’t want to spend the extra money to pick up a high end receiver to truly compliment your Blu-ray player, you will still enjoy an improvement in sound quality over that of DVD simply through DTS or Dolby Digital.

Profiles

Blu-ray player profiles can be though of as industry standards. In order to claim a certain profile, a Blu-ray player must include a specific set of features as a minimum. The requirements for the various profiles are as follows:

Profile 1.0 - This was the first publicly available profile. It really had no minimum requirements aside from, well, playing a Blu-ray disc. No support for secondary audi or video decoders were required. Also not required were an internet connection and local storage.

Profile 1.1 - Atleast 256MB of local storage capacity, support for secondary audio and video decoders in order to facilitate certain features such as picture in picture effects.

Profile 2.0 (sometimes refered to as BD-Live) - Internet connection, local storage requirement increased to a minimum of 1GB

BD-Live

BD-Live offers a level of connectivity never before seen on a video format. If you’ve always loved the bonus features included on DVDs then the improvement in this area alone should be enough to convince you to make the switch to Blu-ray. Blu-ray discs have 5 times the storage capacity of a DVD which allows for more audio commentaries, extra footage, deleted scenes, alternate endings, director commentaries, not too mention built in games which offer a level of interactivity never even imagined with DVD.

If this sounds like a selling point to you, then be sure to pick up a Profile 2.0 player.

Are you a gamer?

If you enjoy console video games, then the best choice may simply be a Sony Playstation 3. Although the Playstation 3 is both a game console and a Blu-ray player, don’t let that suggest that Sony may have sacrificed on quality. In fact, the Playstation 3 is regarded as one of the better Blu-ray players on the market.

If you see anything in this guide that you feel is innacurate, or perhaps something that you feel is important but we have failed to mention, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we’d love to hear from you.