So you want to buy a Blu-ray Player. What should you look for? Well, one of the first thing that you should look for is does it have Ethernet capability. In other words does it connect to the internet? If it connects the internet it gives you a lot more capability that you would have stand alone player. First of all, firmware upgrades. What is firmware? Well firmware is the feature set of your Blu-ray Player. So these new Blu-ray Players now have the capability of having updates even after you purchase it. As long as it connect the internet you can upgrade the firmware and so if there is a new feature coming out or bug fix or whatever, the entire player can be upgrade automatically because it is connected to the internet.
But it also gives you some other capabilities, for example you can have widgets. You get the weather, the news, things like veracast that Panasonic has. A number of other companies have that or getting movies downloaded directly from a service like netflix or amazon, all that is happening with a Blu-ray Player that is connected to the internet.
Of course, doing that also gives you the BD life capability. BD life is an enhanced capability so you’re watching your Blu-ray disc and there’s a new feature that comes out on the disc where there’s a new movie coming out by some of the actors on the film. Guess what? With the BD life you’ll be able to go and find out that to see the trailer of the film. Even though it was not in the disc originally because the internet, it adds it to the program.
Another thing to look for on a Blu-ray Player is having a memory slot and like an SD slot on the front of the Blu-ray Player. Then with an SD slot you can take your still pictures that come out of your cameras, stick it right in, take a card out of your camera, stick it right into the Blu-ray Player and instantly you can watch your slides on your TV. Or if you have a camcorder that uses an SD card and it shoots on the AVCHD format which is the high definition format that forms on this little SD cards, you can stick that right in and play it.
Up converting, that’s a very important capability, take a look and find that a Blu-ray Player has a good up converter. Up converting is taking a standard DVD that you have in the past and up converting it to a program that looks very much like high definition. It’s not high def but it makes it look much, much better. It’s the up converter, a good up converter makes a big difference.
Deep color, another thing to look for, TVs today can display much more color than the older ones. And so they refer to that as 1HDMI 1.3 deep color XYZ color. Basically all of these to say much broader color range and gives you much better picture.
And finally there is something called 24P playback. What’s 24p? Well motion pictures are not shot in 30 frames in a second. They are shot in 24 frames per second. And when normal DVD players playback a movie on a DVD, they take that 24 and they convert it to 30 which is not really the full cinema experience. But with Blu-ray Players you can output the 24 exactly the way it was produced by the producers. And if you have a Blu-ray Player with a 24p at a TV that takes 24p. Connect them digitally you’re going to get that 24p experience. Add NTHX sound, add in home theater, add in the wonderful quality of a plasma or LCD set today. And you have an experience that rivals the movie theater.
Hope this was helpful. If you want more information, don’t hesitate to go to livinginHD.com look at the answer man. Please don’t hesitate to put comments on. I’d love to hear from you and I will be happy to answer it on the other episode. Thanks.
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