Word: rays
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...wondered too. So we bought a Blu-ray player and watched a couple of dozen current and classic movies on it. Here are some first thoughts from a veteran movie critic (who, trust us, is in no way a techno-whiz...
...ItPop in some treasured oldie like John Ford's 1956 western The Searchers (a frequent entry point for Blu-ray connoisseurs), and voilą! Instant enlightenment. As the '40s film critic Cecilia Ager said when Citizen Kane opened, "It's as though you had never seen a movie before." Colors and textures are richly, plausibly vibrant, with an astonishing depth of field; all those Fordian shots of the Plains as seen from a ranch-house door lend equal clarity to the foreground and the far horizon. Blu-ray gives a 3-D impression, as if the figures in a scene were...
...ray also has a practical advantage: DVDs can be played on it. Every other upgrade in home entertainment - from 16 mm to laser disc to VHS and DVD - has meant the obsolescence of the previous format. This time you can embrace the new technology without mothballing your DVD collection. No awful separation anxiety. (See the top 10 movie performances...
...next-next generation of digital downloads, that will take a while - maybe quite a while. Bandwidth is still a problem; visual quality lags behind that of standard DVDs. What Blu-ray offers could be matched or exceeded by the Internet within a decade, but we believe tech maven David Carnoy, who writes on the authoritative website CNET, "Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon...
...ToDVDs are fine. We thought so before Blu-ray and still do. They were a big advance over videocassettes in clarity and durability; whereas a cassette, like a vinyl record or an eight-track, deteriorated simply by being played, DVDs don't erode with age. The Searchers, The Third Man, The Dark Knight and WALL?E all look terrific on DVD. As terrific as on Blu-ray? Not quite. But what are we, eye doctors...