The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I did it for the better video quality and that I'm not elderly enough to stick with older and outdated technology, like old people that stuck with VHS since they already had a bunch of stuff on that and they weren't interested in spending all their social security on movies before they die.

I watch HD stuff on HD and SD sets and there is an obvious difference between DVD and blu-ray and I even haven't gone through the trouble of running video setup discs.

If something is on both formats but the blu-ray version is a lot higher(usually not the case), then I'll go with DVD. Otherwise I'll get a combo pack or just the blu-ray, since occasionally the combo packs are a little too high.

I rebuy certain things but I'm not going to rebuy stuff just for the sake of rebuying it. It's just the stuff I really like.

That's not to say I think blu-ray is the greatest thing in the world. I prefer the non-restrictiveness that came with HD-DVD. No region codes, less DRM and standards when it came to players and the manufacturing of the discs. Unfortunately, the Sony side won, so some movies won't play on some players until updates are done, which may or may not be ready when the movie comes out. Or issues similar to when Iron Man first came out and the issues with that. While they were resolved, it sucks that people were having problems on release day for a movie that popular.

Ash Ketchum

Main reason: my nephews bought me a Blu-ray player for Xmas. (After I waxed ecstatic at how great HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962) looked on their 60-inch screen on Thanksgiving.)

Second reason: The Japanese pop music concerts I like come with extra numbers on the Blu-ray editions. But these Blu-rays are pretty damned expensive. (The 2-concert set + extras I recently bought offers five hours of material and the cost was about $117!)

So, aside from 2 Blu-ray concert sets, I only have 10 actual movies on Blu-ray (all purchased for under $15 each) and am not planning on doing much in the way of upgrading. I still watch movies/Japanese TV shows predominantly on DVD and VHS.

comanche_doyle

my reason is that I wanted a PS3 for gaming, and the movie part was just gravy. still have a small collection of blu, but its has blossomed this year thanks to the amazon deals thread.

FantasticVSDoom

I like the color Blue... Its my favorite.

bigjim25

I love gravy and biscuits with my DVDs.

JOE29

I agree. I changed over last year to bluray. But i'm not going to changeover all of my standard's to blu. But I have changed over the DVD's that I really like, for instance, Once Upon a Time in the West which was fantastic. But there are also some dud's in there too like Excalibur. So I have to pick and choose which DVD's that I want to change over. Some DVD's aren't even worth changing over. Mainly the older ones. And not just change them over for the sake of changing them over. Also have you see the 3-D DVD's that are popping up now? I'm not a 3-D guy, so i'm going to bypass the whole 3-D thing. But others may go with it. Going from standard to Blu to 3-D is something that i'm not even going to mess with. That includes buying a 3-D TV, which i have no interest at all in buying.

Travis McClain

We already had an HDTV (a very modest 32" Phillips) and it kinda bugged me that we weren't actually watching anything in HD on it! Our DirecTV is SD, mostly because it's not our house and the account isn't in our names but even if it was I don't know that we watch enough TV often enough that we would justify the increase in price. It'd be nice to watch Reds games in HD, but other than those we really just don't watch much OTA TV content.

I was, of course, drawn to the idea of having my favorite movies in the finest A/V format on the market and I have to say that watching some of the catalog titles has been like falling in love all over again. I saw things in Warner's Wizard of Oz and Batman Blus that I had never seen before, and I couldn't even guess how many times I've seen each over the years. In fact, I had just seen Batman from the third row at a local theater just a few months before we got the Blu-ray and I was still distracted seeing details that I had never before noticed!

My wife cobbled together the money for the player as a surprise birthday gift for me in 2009, but she thought it was just a waste even when she bought it. Our first Blu-ray purchase was Star Trek, and before the opening titles she recanted every suspicion she had voiced about the improvement in quality. I think she's even more excited to watch favorites on Blu-ray than I am! The only thing I don't really like is that I can't watch bonus features in bed like I can with DVD, and I'm certainly not about to go out and buy a second HDTV and Blu-ray player just so I can do that.

Would we have gone Blu had my wife not felt compelled to do something nice for me? I dunno. I would never have made it a priority, but given the emphasis on combo packs these days I think we'd eventually throw up our hands and say it made no sense to resist anymore. I mean, when you can buy True Grit in Blu/DVD/DC combo pack this week for the same price as just the DVD, it makes you wonder what you're really saving or accomplishing by resisting the new format.

Plus, I'm very pleased by the pricing of Blu-ray already. We've paid an average of $12.89 per title in our library. Some of them have been free (like a pair of birthday Blus from Disney Movie Rewards and Gremlins, which we just got with our Warner rewards points), but some have been pricier than intended (like Batman Digi-book, which I just had to have and couldn't find anywhere but Best Buy once we had gone Blu). Between retailer sales, studio coupons and Half Price Books, I expect that average paid price to only dwindle.

asianxcore

I still buy both, but I mainly adopted Blu-Ray because of the picture quality.

At the time I bought a 60GB PS3 for games and I bought a couple Blu-Rays in hoping they would look good. Thought that if I wasn't impressed, I wouldn't have to buy anymore.

Unfortunately for me the first films I bought for Blu-Ray were the first two Pirates films

d2cheer

I wanted a PS3 and it came with it. So it was an extra bonus. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have made the switch.

Hokeyboy

We have two HD sets and 3 Blu-Ray players in the house. SD looks quaint in comparison. If you don't see a difference, you have shit equipment or you're an entire dope, running component cables or the like.

I do not purchase DVDs anymore. There's no point, unless it's something ultra-rare and only available in DVD.

Wannabe

I finally bought a humble 32" 720p HDTV and a 2.1 soundbar. I also have an upscaling DVD player. With my current setup, would I experience any noticeable improvement by adding a Blu-Ray player to the mix?

Hokeyboy

At 720p? Not a whole lot.

boc4ever

I actually wanted to upgrade to Blu, but got the PS3 to upgrade my gaming system also. However, I refused to upgrade until I got my hands on the backwards compatible 60g system. I thought it was utter bullshit that Sony limited play on their old games. Now that I have seen the difference, it is hard to watch standard dvds that are visually interesting like Dark City, etc. Action movies, comedys, etc. I could care less, but I buy the blu if it is reasonable and there are decent extrras.

Guru Askew

You can say all you want about physical media dying and the fact that DVD is good enough for 95% of people but If you're posting on this forum there's no excuse to not upgrade to Blu. Anyone who actually cares about the presentation of a movie in regards to transfer, extras etc. but refuses to upgrade is just being stubborn at this point. I fought it like everyone else in this thread but eventually I gave in and I'm glad I did.

Some of the things I feared happened, I generally have no desire to watch something on DVD when its available on Blu. The thing is, I was frequently upgrading DVDs for improved transfers so I don't know why I was so opposed to upgrading from DVD to Blu. What I do know is that in hindsight I wish the DVD-to-Blu upgrade process of my collection would have started a couple years earlier than it did.

As people in this thread have already said: you can still watch your DVDs on your Blu-ray player so its not like your collection is worthless, even if it kinda feels that way sometimes. Bottom line: the ability to watch the admittedly-limited library of Blu-ray discs in addition to the vast DVD catalog available is worth the $100 or whatever it costs for a decent player, and once you give up and accept that you'll find that you're glad you did because for all its quirkly little flaws Blu-ray is a substantial upgrade over DVD in every way that counts.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I disagree. There's still an obvious difference at 480i.

Of course it depends on what you're watching too.

bse

I don't understand the people who flat out say "I don't buy DVDs anymore" there are so many amazing films still being released that are DVD only, are you a fan film? When I was younger I was amazed when I could find a 3rd generation VHS dub of a Godard film or anything not readily available, but now DVD isn't good enough for people? are you film fans? because your going to be missing a lot of great movies with your stance. I'm a fan of blu-ray and DVD and of course would prefer to view a film on blu-ray BUT when I can get DVDs for a few dollars - I'll go with the DVD.

I recently sold off about 100 blu-rays and I'm going to try and keep my blu-ray collection to films that are important in my mind, for movies I plan on watching once or twice, I'll buy the DVD for a couple bucks, the assumption that you have to disown DVD once you buy a blu-ray player kills me, film is film.

bse

Extras? Just like the Graduate blu-ray I just bought that has a trailer for an extra and nothing ported over from the 40th anniversary DVD, blu-ray doesn't always offer the extras DVD does, so that part of your post is void.

Pizza

I invested in Blu-ray for both better picture and sound. However, it's not replacing my DVDs. Not every movie benefits highly from the format. I got a lot of B movies that look and sound about as fine as they can on DVD and are not likely to get remastered to perfection in a blu-ray. (And, if they do, I'll gladly buy it.) Generally, I do buy newer movies on Blue or an older film that truly benefits and has been remastered. Even when I buy a Blue version of a title I already own, I still keep the DVD. I can take a DVD anywhere, not so with Blues yet. Plus, which will last longer? Which format will outlast the other? Time will tell, so I don't retire any of my discs. I'm a little surprised at how many here upgrade to a blu-ray and dump the DVD version.

mdnitoil

Well Guru has inadvertently blurted out my main resistance to Blu. Back in the VHS days, I had a mountain of tapes. DVD comes along, and the quality difference is so dramatic that I found that I just couldn't stand to watch tape anymore. It didn't matter that most of those titles had yet to appear on DVD, I just made do with the limited DVD library I had. Now if the quality improvement in Blu is equally dramatic, regardless of whether I'm able to watch DVD, I'll choose not to...I have the history to prove it. At well over 3000 DVD titles, that's a particularly foolish path for me to take. Conversely, if the quality improvement is not so dramatic, then why the hell am I even bothering? So I find myself living in ignorance and enjoying what I have. Basically, I'm saving myself from myself.

smurr05

None IMO!

Hokeyboy

I disagree with your disagreement, but that's why god put erasers on pelicans.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Like what? More recent releases, the better, for examples.

Ash Ketchum

Hey, I still watch plenty of films on VHS, many of which have never come out on DVD. When I participated in the B-movie challenge (see link below), I went through boxes of tapes in the closet and dug out plenty of things I'd never seen or had seen only once on TV decades ago. And I plowed through them for the challenge. Perfectly enjoyable films, but did I need to upgrade any of them to DVD? No. And of the DVDs I watched for the challenge and enjoyed, did I need to upgrade any to Blu-ray? Absolutely not. What I had in these formats was perfectly fine. Not everything needs to be seen so clearly.

When I was a budding film buff in college, we watched classic films on TV all the time--pan-and-scan, cut for content/time slot, interrupted by commercials and all on a b&w TV set. That's how we learned about film. But when these films came to revival theaters in the city, we knew what to go see. And many of the films we saw in theaters back then circulated in battered prints so when I finally saw some of these on DVD (e.g. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE), I was struck by how much better they looked than they did in theaters.

Now, I have THE WILD BUNCH on Blu-ray and I'm going to watch it for the DVD Talk Historical Challenge, which is going on now. This is a great film and one that I've seen over two dozen times--in theaters, on VHS, on DVD. This will be the first time I'll be seeing it on Blu-ray and I will report on the experience. THE WILD BUNCH, unlike, say, THE STREET FIGHTER'S LAST REVENGE, needs to be seen clearly.

mdnitoil

Ummm, any one of the many MOD programs only deal in DVD. Check Warner Archives. What are they up to, something like 500 titles now? All DVD, not a blu in sight. Of course these are generally older films, so perhaps they don't appeal to the average blu buyer in the first place.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Yeah, I was thinking about stuff like that or what Mill Creek puts out. I was wondering if he meant things that come out at stores on Tuesdays and not so much DVD-R releases.