Get the Best Movie Experience with Blu-ray Disc Players

Blu-ray disc players are now being adopted at a faster rate than DVD was back in the first couple years after it came out. What this means is that, if you haven't yet, now is a great time to discover the great advantages that Blu-ray has to offer.

(Photo credit: Netgrafika)

A Brief History

Let's take a step back for a minute and have a look at where Blu-ray technology came from. To begin with, DVD had long been struggling with storage limitations; certain video games and movies had to be shipped on multiple discs, as a single DVD was no longer large enough to hold all of the information. Blu-ray was envisioned by Sony and Philips as the heir apparent to DVD, offering a disc of the same form factor but containing orders of magnitude most storage capacity. To be more specific, a dual-layer Blu-ray disc has a 50 gigabyte capacity.

In its early days, Blu-ray players were hugely expensive and few movies were released for them. As with any new format, there were several growing pains, including resistance from Hollywood studios with regards to digital rights management. It took a while, but the specifications of the Blu-ray disc were finalized in 2004.

The High Definition Format War

In the first couple of years, Blu-ray experienced stiff competition from HD DVD, which had a small head start getting to the market. Sony's PlayStation 3 was probably most responsible for Blu-ray’s eventual triumph over HD DVD; when it was released with a built-in Blu-ray player, it helped a great many families make the transition to from DVD to Blu-ray for their home movie needs. The rival Xbox 360, on the other hand, did not ship with an HD DVD player equipped. An external drive was later released for the console, but it was too little, too late.

The Advantages of Blu-ray

As mentioned previously, Blu-ray discs have huge storage capacities. They are best known for offering a vastly superior audio and video experience than their predecessors, the DVD. The inferior image quality of DVD was due largely to the storage limitations of the disc; the video was, quite literally, compressed to fit on the disc. With Blu-ray, a solution had finally been found. Movies filmed with the latest high definition cameras no longer had to compromise on their image quality in order to fit on the storage medium.

While early adopters paid a significant premium for Blu-ray disc players and Blu-ray discs, those sitting on the fence will be pleased to know that as Blu-ray has gained popularity, the prices have decreased dramatically. Players are now highly affordable, and the discs themselves are, most of the time, priced only slightly higher than their DVD counterparts.