When you're Blu

I broke down and bought a Blu-Ray player this week. 'cause, hey, watching movies is my big vice.

The first Blu-Ray disc I bought was Batman Begins because I think it's sufficiently visually interesting and I've seen the standard DVD version enough times that I can compare the two fairly effectively. My conclusion: Blu-Ray is pretty.

I had to fuss with a few configuration settings to get (what I consider) the right settings. My TV is surprisingly dumb about incoming formats. It has a few options to support 4:3 versus 16:9 output. But it seems happiest making images to use the entire TV screen space. Invariably, this involves scaling the image, which I kinda hate. I don't notice horizontal scaling (such as scaling old 4:3 films, like Casablanca, to 16:9), but vertical scaling (such as a 2.40:1 blockbuster film) looks really wrong to my eyes. Even some very recent TV shows, like The Wire are only in 4:3.

Eventually I found a setting by which the Blu-Ray player could emit the image with appropriate letterboxing so that the original aspect ratio is preserved, and the TV doesn't try to do its weirdness. But I do find myself confused about why people might prefer stretching (to the extent that that's the default set-up). Hm.

The first film I thought about buying on Blu-Ray is Solaris: it's such a visually gorgeous film. Sadly, it's not out on Blu-Ray yet. I won't replace the whole DVD collection -- that'd cost a pretty penny. But a few choice films -- I could see that. I'll probably rent more on Blu-Ray when it's an option.