The Best Blue Ray Player

You may be asking yourself; Blue Ray, what is it anyway? Why would I want to invest my money in buying the best blue ray player out there, when everyone tells me that there's a recession going on out there?

Both are good and valid questions to ask - so I'll try to see if I can come up with answers to match.

The Blu-Ray format is the next generation DVDs, and basically the difference between a Blu-Ray DVD and a standard DVD is down to the amount of information that can be stored on the discs. So, what difference does that make? Well, the movies you can put on a disc is converted into digital information that your blue ray player will read and transform back into something you can watch on your TV/Home Cinema.

Now, when a movie is stored on a digital media, the amount of information contained is much larger than what you can fit onto a standard DVD, and so the information needs to be compressed, meaning a loss of quality in both picture and sound. With the Blu-Ray format this problem has been overcome, because the information that was previously stripped out, will now fit onto the discs. For the sake of comparison - it's like the jump from VHS video tapes - to standard DVD movies.

I hope this answers your question as to what blue ray is, and how it's different from the old DVDs.

Now, to the other part of the question: Why should I invest in the best blue ray player out there? Well - if you're like almost everyone else, who have gone out and invested in a HD Ready TV, you're not getting the best out of either your TV or your standard DVDs, unless you get a player that will play your DVDs and/or blue ray DVDs in a higher definition.

Qestion is: Is it worth it? If you found it worthwhile upgrading your VHS video recorder to DVD when the DVDs became widely available, like the blue ray format is taking off at the moment, the answer would be a resounding YES!

Once you decide to invest in the best blue ray player for your money - it's time to think about what you need to buy as well - in order to make the most of your blue ray player.

There is three things you need to have in place, at least, to really enjoy everything it has to offer.

Firstly, and most importantly, you need a HD Ready TV, which now a days means a plasma TV. This is the whole point of buying a blue ray player - to be able enjoy the High Definition content that the player has to offer. HD Ready televisions comes in all sorts of quality and size - and they're a large investment in themselves - but a good pointer would be to find out which HD Ready TV's are the best sellers on sites like Amazon.com etc.

The best selling Blue ray players and HD Televisions are not an exhaustive guide, however. You also need to think about how and where they're going to fit in to your house etc., and the same old saying still applies that you get what you pay for. The myth that you're paying extra for a name make doesn't apply in this case - there's a reason why they became name makes - and quality of the product does have a role to play in this.

The second thing you'll need is a so called HDMI cable - which is a cable to connect your blue ray player to your Plasma TV. Basically this is an upgrade of the Scart cable that most people have become used to - but they're inadequate to transfer the HD signal from your blue ray player to your TV.

The third thing you'll need we're going to discover in more detail below.....

It's needless to say, really, but I'm going to do it anyway..... Blu-Ray movies!

Where as blue ray players will play your old standard DVDs - and possibly do it in a better quality than your old DVD player - you need to start buying DVDs with the Blu-Ray logo on them.

The reason for this is, as I mentioned before, that the Blu-Ray Disks hold a lot of extra information on them that your blue ray player can use to make your home movie watching experience even better!

All movies released now will be released in Blu-Ray format - as will most of your old favorites - so whether you're looking for new releases, or an old epic - it's there for you to buy in Blu-Ray format.