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Getting the best out of Blu-ray

Blu-ray takes movies to a whole new level, but only if your other gear is up to the job. Anthony Fordham outlines the upgrade options.

Since there are now, at last, a decent number of Blu-ray movies to choose from in stores, it's time to consider a proper Blu-ray upgrade for your AV system.

But upgrading to Blu-ray is about more than just going out and buying a Blu-ray player. Just do that, and you'll end up with an experience that's only marginally superior to DVD. A proper upgrade must consider all elements of your movie-watching setup.

Unfortunately, for the newcomer to serious AV, Blu-ray is a more complicated system than DVD. That all BD players are not created equal is probably easy enough to grasp, but the TV or projector you use also needs to be chosen carefully, and the audio system has an important role to play too.

Since Blu-ray is the current pinnacle of digital technology, it's also important that analog cables and switching be excluded as much as possible when dealing with a BD movie, and that means making heavy use of HDMI.

The new HD format brings with it not just a basic new kind of disc, but a whole host of other formats, all of which your setup needs to be capable of, to display the best BD experience possible.

As you read this upgrade guide, and despair at the stress it's likely to put on your credit card, take heart: Blu-ray can work as simply as DVD. Buy a player, plug it in to your TV. It just won't show off the format at its best. But unlike upgrading to DVD from VHS - where starting with a basic DVD player gives you instant benefits, even if you're watching on a 14 inch CRT TV - a dedicated lover of all things home entertainment should consider the actual Blu-ray player as their final purchase. Make the system ready first, then take the final step.

A Blu-ray world

BD isn't just about movies, of course. These discs can store up to 50GB of data and it's certainly the intention of the consortium that BD eventually replace CD and DVD in notebook optical drives.

You can already buy notebooks with BD drives, though they tend to be higher-end 'multimedia' systems that trade portability for increased power and bigger displays. It's also possible to get a 5.25 inch BD drive for your desktop PC. These cost from $250 up to $900 and the best can read and burn every optical disc format under the sun... except the poor defunct HD DVD of course.

You might also expect BD to be available on video cameras, similar to those models that burn directly to an 8cm DVD. While such units have been offered, there are none on the market anymore, because cameras tend to use hard drives instead, encoding their HD content using the AVCHD format.

You can of course play this into a Blu-ray recorder or master it on your PC and burn it to Blu-ray, for later playback on BD players that support BD-R discs.

More and more notebooks integrate a Blu-ray drive for archiving data to recordable discs, and playing back Blu-ray movies. Many also provide a HDMI socket for connecting directly to a high definition TV.

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In this article

• Getting the best out of Blu-ray
• The best TV for Blu-ray
• The AV receiver - sensational Blu-ray sound
• The Blu-ray player
• Blu-ray's big challenge