Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
If you're thinking of getting a Blu-ray player for the holidays, you should know not all players are alike. The differences in these players are so drastic that not all of them can play the same movies.
The price of Blu-ray players has gone down for the holidays, and may drop even more later. "We suspect that next month, at CES (The Consumer Electronics Association Trade Show), we'll begin to see some of the Blu-ray recorders starting to appear, and that's the reason we're starting to see the cost of the Blu-ray players come down so much," explained Ted Bollinger, vice president of sales for TV Specialists.
Bollinger says some people don't know Blu-ray players can read DVDs, so they don't necessarily need to buy their movies again. As a matter of fact, he says Blu-rays can make DVDs look better. "Scaling or expanding a DVD to its full capability is something that a good Blu-ray does an amazing job with," he said.
Also, with older players -- and by "older," I mean still less than a year old -- new movies might not work at all. Nerve Custom Integrators owner Todd Astill says that's because manufacturers didn't use the same format for their players, so some people who bought "Spiderman 3" got an unpleasant surprise.
"Many players that were launched in March or April and, you know, even in July of this year were not capable of playing some of the disks. But most manufacturers, for the holidays season, have stepped up to Profile 1.1," Astill said.
Profile 1.1 can play practically all formats, but it doesn't come with a discount player. "They may be cheap because it doesn't play those formats," Astill explained.
As for sound quality, Blu-rays aren't compressed like DVDs, so you get the studio quality instead of DVD quality, but you won't get the full effect from an older surround-sound system. "The new formats can only be interpreted directly by a few receivers right now," Astill said.
Newer models, however, can down-sample the sound into a format your older stereo can understand.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
