Yesterday, it was five years ago the Sony PlayStation 3 debuted along with Sony's new format for DVDs. While it had a harsh start at the beginning, the PlayStation 3 now has some of the best video games out on the market. With the new DVD format, it was called Blu-Ray. It received criticism because it was the same thing as an HD DVD format that had just came out. Was Blu-Ray destined to fail?
It was, since HD DVD was poised to be the next big format. However, the critics were all wrong. HD DVDs have now become obsolete and Blu-Ray has become the lead high definition format for home movies.
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The praise for it is well deserved as I have seen several movies, like The Dark Knight, Die Hard, and more recently Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. The picture quality is the best I have ever seen, and the special effects look even better. If anyone has an HD television set, this just adds to the whole experience. With live action movies, it's great and I've heard with animated movies like Toy Story or any of the other Pixar films it looks even better. However, if there is one complaint that I could have with Blu-Ray's picture quality, it's with older black and white movies. It's A Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies of all time, but put in high definition it looks...not the best. Young Frankenstien also looks pretty bad as well. Maybe it was because the format of the cameras are different, or maybe HD was made for color as opposed to black and white?
Another criticism that I have for it, is if you don't own a PlayStation 3 than you might have to go out and buy a Blu-Ray player and those are rather expensive. However, despite these minor criticisms, the Blu-Ray movies still can stand on their own and the amount of content that they contain can keep a viewer busy for hours. Since I'm a pretty big wrestling fan, a lot of the recent WWE collections on Blu-Ray have extra matches and content not seen on regular DVD sets. The Star Wars re-releases (I think they re-release those movies every few years now) have TONS of content as well like documentaries and such.
It had a rough start and a lot of criticism, but I think that the Blu-Ray format is here to stay and eventually, become the norm for most people's formats for movies. It's interesting to see that this new format that was almost destined to fail, ended up succeeding. The PlayStation 3's status, well that's another blog for another day.
Submitted by Colin Barry
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