My wife has several times expressed to me lately a desire to watch LoveFilm from our bedroom but there we have an older Sony Bravia tv connected to a Sony dvd player/recorder. So we've had to watch films and tv series on the laptop if we wanted to use LoveFilm. Downstairs it is possible to watch LoveFilm straight on the tv, after connecting the tv to the router with a cable but the cable trails on the floor and it isn't ideal. So I was trying to figure out what would work best for us. Up until this weekend I didn't realise that the latest Blu Ray players connected to the Internet directly via wifi and could access online services. I had assumed they were just dumb players, like dvd players or vhs players used to be. I guess this truly does mean the Internet is an entertainment medium, it sounds so obvious and I feel a bit obsolete for not thinking of this before. My wife thought we needed a smart tv like we have in the sitting room but I was worried about the cost and comparing the cost of a new tv to a new Blu Ray player, the latter was certainly cheaper. So that's what we bought on Sunday. I connected it up and we were able to watch an episode of Dexter last night before falling asleep.
We don't have any Blu Ray disks and are not intending to replace any of our existing dvds with Blu Rays but I guess we might find one or two Blu Rays end up in our collection eventually. The dvd output is supposed to be upscaled via more modern Blu Ray players, so using the film Hackers (which I bought on dvd from a charity shop this weekend) I decided to try a little comparison. Here are the results but which do you think is our usual dvd player and which is the Blu Ray, or is the difference so subtle you can't tell? I used the same camera and paused the dvd in almost exactly the same place and tried to stand the same distance from the tv but there will be slight differences between the two shots because I wasn't doing the test under scientific conditions!
2 comments:
Good on you for figuring out a solution to your viewing problems! My daughter has a Roku in her room, so she can watch Netflix, Amazon Prime...whatever streaming media. At some point, I definitely want one for the living room.
Interesting comparison there. This is really just a guess, but is the top one Blu-Ray and the bottom one standard DVD?
LB: Roku looks great, I hadn't come across that option but here in UK it doesn't look like they offer LoveFilm yet. Your guess was a nice try but the bottom photo is actually from the Blu Ray. The difference seems larger between the photos than when watching the screen!
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