Dipping in to Bluray--is it worth a shot?

July 14, 2009 8:55 AM

Bluray disc players significantly improve the visual and auditory quality of movies, so we're told. Does this hold true for TV programs recorded on Bluray?

The final season (4.5) of Battlestar Gallactica is on its way to Netflix, and lo and behold, both DVD and Bluray will be up for grabs. (I know that the season's been pummeled by negative reviews, but that's another topic).

Does Bluray improve, either slightly or dramatically, the quality of TV shows like this one? Or does the inferior quality of video defeat any gains over DVD? I'm guessing that from here on, most TV shows will be available in both DVD and Bluray, meaning it might be time to buy a player.

On that note, and as a corollary question, can anybody vouch for the quality of the PS3 as a Bluray player? Does it measure up to other players on the market?

posted by Gordion Knott to media & arts (14 comments total)

Some anecdotal answers before people with actual experience turn up..

Battlestar Galactica (new) is listed as being produced in 1080i, so yes, Bluray should offer a significant picture improvement. The difference in audio would be less noticeable.

On the PS3 front, I don't own one but I've been doing a ton of research into the Bluray situation lately and I've seen an almost universal thumbs up for the PS3 in comparison to other players with most reviewers saying it offers more at a lower price, and you get a games console for free! I suspect this value proposition will change as Bluray players collapse in price.
posted by wackybrit at 9:00 AM on July 14

1) Most shows are recorded now to be broadcast in high definition. Those programs are then scaled down to 480p for DVD, i.e. not high definition. Therefore by specific numbers you are losing resolution.

If you then put that DVD in an upscaling DVD player, while the output may be 720p you are basically, in the parlance, 'putting lipstick on a pig' because the source is still 480p and will never be higher.

By getting high definition Blu Rays you are getting not only the resolution (or higher) that was offered for broadcast, but often there is less compression on the signal, making it, technically, the best picture you can ever have for these programs.

That is all by the numbers. Your mileage may vary. The truth is, the amount of time and money spent on the Blu Ray transfer makes all the difference. Color can be off, grain can be high, etc.

Here is what I will tell you. I'm watching the series Arrested Development on DVD right now on my PS3 (which upscales DVDs to high def) on my 1080p DLP TV, and the digital noise is very noticeable. Having watched series like Lost on Blu Ray, the picture was far better, and even seeing Arrested Development on television in high def did not have this much noise. It's apples to oranges, as I don't have Arrested Development on Blu Ray to compare against, but in most all things I find the picture clearer coming from Blu Ray (even older movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980) and Ghostbusters)

2) Sadly the PS3 is the best Blu Ray player out there for the money. Wanting to get that into your living room, Sony is taking a hit every time you buy one, and hoping to recoup some money on games, accessories, movies, etc. One of the reasons it's so good is that it is software updatable.

Blu Ray is a somewhat evolving standard and it's fact that some of the older players will not be able to play movies in the future that are made to the NEW Blu Ray standard. This is bound to cause anger and confusion among the masses. MOST Blu Ray players, including the PS3, have a network jack allowing you to download the new specifications and play new discs as standards evolve, but most of the low-end Blu Ray players (priced around the same as the PS3) skimp on that network jack and will leave you high and dry. You have to pay close attention to the software version of the Blu Ray player you buy if you don't get the network connection.

While I've heard one person complain that PS3 doesn't support a specific 7.1 audio codec, that is the only complaint I've heard about the PS3. Everything else I've read says it is the best bang for the buck, providing the Blu Ray experience as good as a $1,000 standalone Blu Ray player.

I have a good friend who refuses to buy a game for his PS3...it's his movie machine only. (I think that's a bit too rigid, but I digress...)

I have a PS3 and can say this. My ONE complaint is that in an enclosed area it will run hot, and when it runs hot some very loud fans come on. I have to keep all doors to my entertainment center open when using this to keep the air circulation going good. But if I keep those doors open, it's a great, great movie player.
posted by arniec at 9:17 AM on July 14 [2 favorites has favorites]

I have a PS3 and can say this. My ONE complaint is that in an enclosed area it will run hot, and when it runs hot some very loud fans come on. I have to keep all doors to my entertainment center open when using this to keep the air circulation going good. But if I keep those doors open, it's a great, great movie player.

I have the same problem, but only during dvd playback. it runs games with no issue. I was considering putting another fan in the back of my entertainment center. I've totally removed a door because of this, but the other components (surround, cable box) get hot too. Cable box gets really realyl hot.
posted by djduckie at 9:26 AM on July 14

Ditto on the PS3, which I can also say from experience is a terrific Blu-ray player. Also, it's a good media-center extender, meaning you can use TVersity to play many videos from your computer in the other room. Also, I have a Flip Mino HD camera, and I can just plug it in to the USB jack on the front of the PS3 and watch recorded videos in high-definition — great if you just want to get a good look at your footage on a big screen before you take it into the PC and start editing. I have it on an open bookshelf, and I've never once noticed the fans running. (That XBOX 360 a few shelves above it is a different story, plus it drops frames on video content. So did the one it replaced.)

On the subject of TV, yes, a recent show like BSG or Dexter or True Blood will look much better on Blu-ray — as will older series that were originally shot on 35mm film, if they've been remastered in HD. Original Star Trek episodes look very nice in high-def. There is an open question of whether you will necessarily perceive or especially care about the higher-quality picture (some people insist DVD looks "good enough" in almost every case) but quantitatively you're looking at six times as many pixels of info as well as more accurate color space so it's a lot better in objective terms. I have lots and lots of Blu-ray Discs and for me they're well worth the money.
posted by Joey Bagels at 9:29 AM on July 14

Galactica itself isn't the best candidate for "improvement through HD." The series is shot in HD video, but shot in a sort of experimental and affected style -- lots of blown highlights, grain introduced, stuff like that, on purpose. So there's not as much visual clarity in the image itself to be revealed by the higher-res. It still looks better, but not as SLAM-BANG WOW as stuff like Planet Earth does.

In general, stuff on BD will look VASTLY better than SD, and substantially better then HDTV through a normal cable or satellite provider (because they're not cutting the bitrate to shit to try to squeeze another HD channel in).

Any show presented in HD will look (and sound) better on BD. Additionally, older shows that were shot on film can potentially look better on BD than dvd if the original film is around to be scanned at high-res. IE, the original Star Trek was shot on film and there are HD releases of it. Whether it looks better, or whether it just shows the flaws in the originals that were intended to be good enough for 196x tv, is debatable.

For that matter, even stuff that doesn't visually benefit as much from hi-def can still benefit from being on BD. Frex, the most recent season of the Venture Bros fits on a single disc, even if I don't really care to see Jonas Venture's cartoon wang in HD.

The PS3 is an awesome piece of consumer electronics. At this point if all you want is a BD player, there are probably about-as-good for noticeably cheaper. We love ours as a media streamer. And yeah, you get a game machine thrown in for free. As a BD player, you're unlikely to get any noticeable improvements without throwing down substantially more cash.

About the only potential downside to the PS3 is the audio outputs. If you have a receiver with no HDMI in but 5.x or 7.x channel analog-in, you are boned. The PS3 doesn't have multichannel analog out. And digitally, you need HDMI for the high-def audio. Also, a sane person wouldn't care, but the PS3 unzips the high-def audio codecs internally and pumps out 5.x/7.x LPCM instead of sending the zipped bitstream to the receiver. Either way, the receiver still ends up playing you the exact same waveform. The only difference is that the DTSMasterAudioBeefSupremeUltraTHXRaptorTron light on your receiver won't light up.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:34 AM on July 14

While I've heard one person complain that PS3 doesn't support a specific 7.1 audio codec

I'm pretty sure that the PS3 has supported all BD audio codecs for a few firmware revisions now.

It won't bitstream any of the high-def codecs, but it will internally decode them and send the resulting LPCM bitstream to the receiver over HDMI.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:36 AM on July 14

The PS3 is the de facto reference player for Blu-ray. Discs are authored for optimal performance on this platform. I recommend no other player.

And I love the PS3's Bluetooth remote—you don't have to worry about line-of-sight or blocked IR receivers when you want to play, pause, eject, etc.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:55 AM on July 14

I did some research into the PS3 vs a blu-ray dvd player last fall, and decided to go with a blu-ray dvd player. There are some great deals to be had (I found a Sony player on their website for $150), all the new players support BD-Live, and I'm not really a gamer, so for us the PS3 just didn't make sense.

As for picture quality, I think there's a huge difference, but my boyfriend insists that he can't tell the difference (he's kind of contrary when it comes to technology, though).
posted by amarynth at 10:05 AM on July 14

In answer to your first question--I can't speak to BSG, but the Blu-ray release of Band of Brothers (which has a similarly desaturated color palette) completely crushes the previous DVD set on all counts. Mad Men looks amazing as well.

In answer to your corollary--get a PS3, for all the reasons cited by other posters above.
posted by Prospero at 12:13 PM on July 14

To clear up the confusion, its not the actual Blu-ray player or the disc that improves the quality, its how the movie is encoded/processed. The Blu-ray format just provides a more efficient codec and more storage.

There are plenty of crappy looking Blu-ray encodes, you can't depend on the media format to judge quality, that said, if both formats are equally available (ie price), Blu-ray is probably a better choice.
posted by wongcorgi at 1:56 PM on July 14

As far as TV goes, if it was filmed in HD, you'll see the difference in Bluray. If the show was produced before HD filming was available, you won't see any benefit over DVD (but you won't see this in the market in reality).
As for older movies, they take the original analog film and encode it into Bluray. Newer movies are usually filmed in High Def to begin with.
The PS3 is a great Bluray player. It can also play encoded (Divx, xvid, mp4) movies off your home network (look for TVersity) or discs. Some even have great PS2 backwards compatibility if you don't see any PS3 games you like at the moment.
posted by ijoyner at 5:53 PM on July 14

Second wongcorgi- it's not the medium, it's the media. You can cram hours and hours of crap onto a DVD and it would be "DVD QUALITY!!!". Which is meaningless. I have seen* plenty of Blueray material that was terrible looking.

* Sadly, always at stores trying to sell Blueray players and HDTVs...
posted by gjc at 9:18 PM on July 14

If the show was produced before HD filming was available, you won't see any benefit over DVD (but you won't see this in the market in reality).

This isn't true for show that were originally shot on film, and where that film is available for scanning. Star Trek was mentioned above. HDNet does/did show Hogan's Heroes in HD.

But the larger point that being on a BD doesn't make it look great is true.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:09 PM on July 14

One other reason to go for the PS3: It's a faster computer than most Blu-Ray players. I have a PS3, while my parents have a regular Sony standalone. I've watched the same Blu-Ray disc on both systems, and the standalone takes a MUCH longer time to chug through all the loading/initializing phases. The PS3 is actually over-powered for the task of playing BDs, because the gaming side requires so much oomph.
posted by Doctor Suarez at 6:47 PM on July 15