Blu Ray Boasts Birthday, Better Sales, Bigger Variety

BluRay home video technology has been on the market for three years this month (as of June 20), but sales were unimpressive until the competing HD-DVD format was discontinued last year. Now, as high-definition TV sales gradually increase, not only are dropping prices helping BluRay to cut into standard DVD sales of recent titles, but more and more older films are finally showing up in BluRay versions. Many can now be found in the $10 to $20 range – comparable to standard DVD prices a few years ago, and causing DVD prices from major studios to plunge into the $5 and $10 range.

Unfortunately, except for the James Bond pictures, Disney cartoons, and a few westerns and war films, it is rare for any pre-1970 titles to be carried by retailers in a market this size, so local BluRay player owners must order most of them online (often at substantially lower prices than local retailers have, anyway). For example, in Grand Forks at least two stores carried the new BluRay edition of “Woodstock” (1970), yet the new BluRays of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957), or George Stevens’ multi-Oscar-winning “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959) were nowhere to be found.

Also, other than a few token major classics (only a half-dozen or so currently available and roughly a dozen scheduled by the end of this year, including “Casablanca,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” etc.), all of the older titles to hit BluRay are from the widescreen era of 1953 and later. One reason for this, besides a somewhat lower demand, is that many people with widescreen TV sets do not understand why there must be black bars on the sides of the picture for non-widescreen movies (the same people who don’t grasp the concept of letterboxing on standard TVs). More important, however, is that the widescreen films display the most obvious image improvement from BluRay’s hi-def capability.

A 4x3 image on a properly encoded standard DVD can look nearly as sharp as the BluRay version when played with a DVD player that upscales the resolution to simulate HD (which every BluRay player can do); but widescreen films squeezed into the standard DVD format show obvious degradation when blown up on a hi-def TV set, compared with their HD versions. Hence, studios are choosing to put out fewer of the old film rarities that DVD collectors have been enjoying the past several years, and are sticking more to pop hits from the past 55 years for BluRay.

Still, it’s nice to get the chance to revisit movies one saw while growing up (or never saw in theatres because one was too young or not yet born) with a visual clarity and audio quality equal to, and possibly better than they had in their original theatrical presentations. It’s also great to catch up with films missed due to short runs or that never made it to local theatres. Of course this has been possible to do for some 30 years on tape, laserdisc, and then DVD, but never with the potential to rival a commercial theatre’s presentation until BluRay and hi-def home projectors became affordable.

Anyone who still has only a standard-definition television or a hi-def TV that is only 720p resolution and/or is smaller than 40 inches really has no reason to upgrade to a BluRay player or replace DVDs with BluRay versions. An upconverting DVD player with component or HDMI connections will do just as well. However, people who have a 1080p (so-called “full HD”) TV that is larger than 40 inches, especially those with a 1080p projector, a wall-size screen, and a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system, will quickly become addicted to the theatre-quality experience they can get at home with BluRay copies of movies. They’re also more likely to devote a room to a dedicated home theatre, rather than watch movies “on TV.”

Next week I’ll review a few notable BluRay releases of older “catalog” titles from the past three years (all now available in the $10-$20 range), including “The Terminator,” Robocop,” “Baraka,” and “Saturday Night Fever.”