Upgrading From DVD To Blu-Ray
And so it begins anew…
We’re been contemplating upgrading to a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and this week we finally committed to the idea by purchasing a Play Station 3. Unfortunately by doing so, we’re setting ourselves up to be taken advantage of by the movie industry (yet again). Always trying to squeeze more money out of collectors, the typical DVD buying pattern goes something like this:
- First DVD release on Tuesday
- Special extended editions DVD
- Collected box sets with even more extras
…and now, it’s going to be Blu-ray that’s going to be getting my money.
For the record, here’s what our DVD collection looks like today:
I’ve been collecting DVDs since 1998. A couple DVDs every week for 10 years and this is what you end up with. We rarely watch television, opting instead to watch a movie just about every night. We’re running out of shelf space but the way I figure it, purchasing Blu-ray DVDs will free up room due to their slim packaging.
On the negative side, Blu-ray disks are more expensive than their conventional brethern, which means we’ll have to be more selective in our Blu-ray purchases. Instead of buying our movies at Best Buy where new releases cost anywhere from $25 to $30 (who’s plunking down that much for a movie anyway?!), we’ll be ordering them online where they’re much cheaper, or waiting a few months for the new releases to go down in price.
Also, from what I hear, the older movies that are “remastered” for Blu-ray don’t look much better than their regular DVD counterparts. For my money I’ll be sticking to newer movies on Blu-ray, especially if the newer releases take advantage of modern high definition film standards. I can’t see Casablanca looking any better on Blu-ray than it does on DVD.
