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By Julia Kukiewicz
Editor
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
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UK BLU RAY RENTAL
Who offers unlimited Blu Ray rentals in the UK?
Other DVD Rental News & Features
See our other recent related DVD rental and Games rental news stories:
Guide to DVD Rental Free Trials
Anna Konig takes a look at who offers the best DVD Rental free trials and tells you what to look out for if you take up a DVD rental free trial.
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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.
With one of the largest Blu Ray stock counts, a better array of rental plans to choose from and a 1 month free trial, LoveFilm remain our best pick for Blu Ray rental.
The 1-month free trial is available exclusively through Choose, but you can sign up for it here.
Until recently, Lovefilm had the most choice, stocking over 1774 Blu Ray titles, and Blockbuster trails only marginally behind with 1508 ready-to-rent Blu Ray titles.
Blockbuster is a good second choice for Blu Ray rental, especially if you still fancy the idea of popping down to your local Blockbuster to pick out exactly what you want to watch on a Saturday night in.
Blockbuster's fairly new 'Xtra' plans come with free in-store rentals on top of the unlimited (or limited) online by-post rentals.
Cinema Paradiso were renting just over 400 Blu Ray titles. However, it seems they've been investing their hard earned cash in stock piling Blu Ray titles, bringing their current count to 1800.
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.
All the online DVD rental companies we reviewed offer Blu Ray rental as part of any of their normal DVD rental subscription plans.
Bringing up the rear
Dedicated games rental site WhyBuyGames, previously catered for its PS3-owning customers (which has a built-in Blu Ray player) by offering around 512 Blu Ray movie titles. However, it seems over recent weeks the WhyBuyGames website has disappeared and they may no longer be operating.
OutNow (formerly MyMovieStream) brings up the rear with a lacklustre 182 Blu Ray titles for rent.
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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