 |  | By Julia Kukiewicz Staff Writer
Monday, 13 October 2008 |
AS HD DVDs prepare to go the way of Betamax, film-lovers everywhere are slowly starting to invest in the great quality of Blu-ray discs.
But they could save themselves a lot of money by renting Blu-ray now and waiting until the format gets cheaper before buying.
The biggest online DVD rental services already stock Blu-ray.
Currently,Blockbuster
offers the most choice, stocking 837 ready-to-rent Blu Ray titles. Lovefilm
trails only marginally behind (although some of their titles are not necessarily available to rent, counting titles that are 'coming soon') with 799 Blu Ray titles.
Dedicated games rental site WhyBuyGames
- catering for its PS3-owning customers (which has a built in Blu
Ray player) - is roaring ahead in the Blu Ray rental stakes and
now offers 512 Blu Ray titles with - apparently - another 100 coming
in the next few weeks.
Cinema Paradiso
rents just over 400 Blu Ray titles and troubled rental provider
OutNow (formerly
MyMovieStream) brings up the rear with a lacklustre100 Blu Ray titles
for rent.
On the shelves Blu-ray is expensive – around four times the price of a normal DVD – but when you rent online you aren’t charged more for the huge leap in quality you get with the new format.
Blu-ray your way to great movies
If you have a yearning to see the just exactly how craggy Mickey Rourke‘s face is - and let’s face it that impressive facial landslide does most of the acting in films like Sin City - you need Blu-ray.
Not everyone will be able to play Blu-ray Discs: you need a Blu-ray compatible DVD player (or a Playstation 3) to play them and a HD TV to properly show off the quality.
Once you’ve got that, though, you can fit over 9 hours of high definition video onto one 50 GB disc.
HD offers five times the amount of detail of standard definition movies and in the future it’s expected that Blu-ray discs will offer innovative features such as downloadable extras, content that’s updated via an internet connection and the ability to watch live broadcasts of special events.
Since big studios such Disney, Fox, Warner and MGM as are starting to release Blu-ray discs at the same time as Standard Definition DVDs the vast majority of Blu-ray films fall somewhere into the thriller, adventure or action genres.
New comedy comes a close second, though, and a limited number of oldies have also converted to the format: we tracked down John Wayne classic The Searchers for example.
Is DVD dead?
Although Blu-ray will eventually replace standard DVDs altogether there’s not much point replacing your standard DVDs just yet while Blu-ray is still so much more expensive to buy.
Renting out Blu-ray will continue to be the smart film-lover’s choice for some time yet.
"We’ll continue to buy every Blu-ray DVD released for rental," points out Malachi Simons,Online Customer Experience Manager with Blockbuster.co.uk.
"We'll continue to buy and supply back catalogue DVDs to our members and should Blu-ray versions of the same films get released as well, we'll buy and supply those too," he added.
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