Movie Rentals Releasing Tuesday Jan 25, 2011
- Red
- Secretariat
- Saw: The Final Chapter
- The Girl Who Kicked Over the Hornet’s Nest (Scandinavian)
- Stone
- Nowhere Boy
- Like Dandelion Dust
- Machete
To Blu-Ray or Not to Blue-Ray, that is the question. Prices on Blu-Ray have been dropping and dropping. Currently Blu-Ray players are in the same price range as traditional DVD players. Blu-Ray disks are a couple dollars more, if that, than standard DVD’s. Also many Blu-Ray titles come with a regular DVD packaged together. So do I want Blu-Ray or not?
Over a year ago we bought a Blu-ray player. I switched my queue from Netflix from DVD to Blu-Ray. Movies started arriving in Blu-Ray format. I watched a couple on HDTV on my Blu-Ray player and was blown away by the video and sound, awesome! But then I noticed two trends. Blu-Ray disks were sitting on my dresser waiting for a time to go down to the living room, kick someone off the TV to watch them. The disks sat there for a long time, often two weeks or more. Then I went into my queue and started changing the Blu-Ray entries to DVD so that I could get them and watch them quicker without waiting for Blu-Ray. I noticed that I was changing all the films in my queue from Blu-ray to DVD because of something on Blu-Ray that I didn’t want to send back without watching. I thought to myself, why am I paying higher fees for Blu-Ray when everything I’m ordering is on standard DVD, so I switched my account back to normal. I also noticed that a lot of the “short wait, long wait, and very long waits” were Available NOW in standard DVD.
Hmm. I realize that I love the flexibility of DVD even though the quality is not quite as great. I enjoy the content not the quality so much. I think any DVD that I felt strongly enough to purchase would be a Blu-Ray, but I’m a renter. (I have an unopened copy of Toy Story 3 in front of me on Blu-Ray), but as a renter I love the flexibility of popping it in my laptop and watching it while I’m paying bills or cooking dinner or just relaxing in the backyard. (If I had a newer laptop with Blu-Ray that might be different, hunh?)
You may have noticed a link to Amazon on every review page. I generally choose the Blu-Ray version of the film for the link to Amazon because I feel that if I wanted a movie enough to purchase it, I would definitely want Blu-Ray. If you read a review on EdsReview and absolutely want to buy a copy (maybe to see those stupid special features that they don’t give us on the rental copies anymore 🙁 ), I think the Blu-Ray is the best way to go. If you want to purchase a standard version of the DVD (or anything else at all from Amazon) it’s easy to get to from the DVD link for the Blu-Ray edition, and we appreciate you using our link! I’d like to hear from you. If you’d rather I put the standard DVD link (or both the standard and Blu-Ray links) let me know and I can modify the procedure. As it is, I try to put the best deal for the best video in the link as the default. Let me know if you’d like me to change it. And for those who have clicked the link and shopped Amazon, thanks!
Happy Viewing! –Ed
