Buying Guides
Buying Guides Blu-Ray Player and Recorders
Not all Blu-ray players are created equal. We run down the key features that help separate the duds from the diamonds.
Owning a 1080p HDTV without a Blu-ray player is a lot like owning a Camaro without ever getting past half throttle. You’ll never really know what it’s capable of until you put the pedal to the metal (or connect the HDMI cable, as the case may be). With Blu-ray players now as cheap as $100, you don’t have much of an excuse not to see what she can do. But not all Blu-ray players are created equal. Before you go out and grab the cheapest you can find, check out our quick and dirty guide to picking the best for your needs.
Blu-ray Profile Support
As little as a year ago, Blu-ray buyers had to worry about “player profiles.” If you bought a Blu-ray Profile 1.1 player, you couldn’t take advantage of features on Blu-ray Profile 2.0 discs, like watching additional content from the Web. Fortunately, those hellish days of compatibility are pretty much over. Almost any player you can buy today (including those $100 models) supports the latest Blu-ray Profile 2.0 standard, also known as BD-Live. Old models are still floating around, though, so make sure to look for BD-Live support before buying.
Compatibility
All modern Blu-ray players will play DVDs and CDs. But what about photos burned onto a DVD? What about DivX rips on a USB thumb drive? What about streaming Netflix movies from the Web? All these features can make a huge difference if you plan to use your player as a digital media hub and not just a Blu-ray player. Carefully check the spec sheet on your Blu-ray player to make sure it will play the files and formats you intend to use it with.
You can find a list of players compatible with DivX , CinemaNow , Pandora , DLNA and Netflix on their respective Web sites.
One form of compatibility consumers seldom consider until it’s too late is CEC: Consumer Electronics Control. This rarely-discussed standard allows the remote for one piece of equipment – like your TV – to control another piece of equipment – like your Blu-ray player – via the HDMI connection between them. Unfortunately, every manufacturer has its own name for the same technology (Samsung Anynet, Sony Bravia Sync, Panasonic Viera Link, etc.) and most of them aren’t compatible with one another. Check your HDTV to see if it offers CEC, and consider buying a Blu-ray player of the same brand if it does. We’ve found using one remote for both devices – often with on-screen menus to make it even more intuitive – extremely convenient.
Performance
Think all Blu-ray players produce exactly the same video? Not so. Even though Blu-ray video is digital, different players have different ways of processing it. For instance, Sony advertises “Super Bit Mapping” to smooth background shadows and gradients and “HD Reality Enhancer” for sharpening moving edges on its Blu-ray players. Do any of them make a difference? Check reviews to separate gimmicks from useful features. We do have to admit that in general, picture quality is incredibly consistent across Blu-ray players, and many consumers would have a hard time spotting the benefits of these frills.
If you plan to watch DVDs with your Blu-ray player, there’s more room to go wrong. Upconverting 480p DVD-quality video to 1080p is a complex task that can be done quick and dirty (any TV can technically scale up standard-def output from an old DVD player) or with complex algorithms that preserve the most detail and result in the best possible picture. Carefully read reviews to make sure the player you’ve selected will do a good job with your library of old DVDs.
Ports
The HDMI standard has made connecting a Blu-ray player to an HDTV a breeze. One plug and you have picture and sound. But you’ll still need to pay attention to that cluster of ports on the back.
If you’re connecting to an older HDTV, like a CRT set, your TV might only have component video inputs (the red, green and blue ones), rather than an HDMI connector. Although you won’t technically experience full Blu-ray quality with that configuration, you’ll need a player with component video output to watch anything at all.
If you plan on running audio from the Blu-ray player through a receiver to get that bombastic soundtrack in all its 7.1-channel glory, you’ll need to pay attention to audio, too. Ideally, you’ll be able to run an HDMI cable straight to your receiver, letting it handle the process of decoding the audio data and sending it out to each speaker. But you’ll need a newer receiver for that, with an HDMI input and support for audio codecs like DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD. If you still want to use that 20-year-old Yamaha, you’ll probably need a Blu-ray player with analog audio outputs – preferably 7.1 channels. An S/PDIF digital optical output can also do the trick.
As we mentioned earlier, pretty much all modern Blu-ray players meet the BD-Live specification, which requires them to have both an Ethernet port for Internet connectivity, and a USB port. While these are both incredibly useful, many buyers find Wi-Fi much easier to connect, since TVs rarely find themselves in the same room as a hard wire to the Internet.