Amazon.com is running a few sales with Blu-ray movies for $9.99 each. Most are average titles, but there are a few good ones in there too. Some of the our picks:
Unfortunately, they’ve split the sales up, so you have to search around to find some of the $9.99. Check out the links below.
Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series will be available as a Blu-ray box set on July 28, 2009 for $350 suggested retail ($209 preorder price from Amazon.com). The 20-disc box set will include all 4.5 seasons of Battlestar but unfortunately leaves out the 10 webisodes that were included on the DVD version.
Blu-ray Review has a good breakdown of the set’s extras.
Walmart has a rollback deal on the Magnavox NB530MGX Blu-ray player for only $98–the cheapest price we’ve seen yet on a Blu-ray player. The deal can only be found in-store, so you might want to call ahead to check for availability.
There’s a new entrant into the bargain Blu-ray player field. Meijer has introduced the Curtis Mathes Blu-ray player for $99 (that’s base price, not sale price). It has 1080p output, DVD upconverting, Dolby Digital audio, and an Ethernet port for service (which makes it a Profile 1.1 player since it can’t connect to the Internet).
No professional reviews yet, but the reviews at Meijer.com give it an average of 4.5 stars.
Link:
Not to outdone by Walmart, Best Buy is offering their entry-level Blu-ray player, the Insignia NS-2BRDVD, for $129. However, unlike Walmart’s $128 Magnavox, this is advertised as a sale price.
Link:
Bargain Blu-ray players just received a new record low price with Walmart selling the Magnavox NB530MGX Profile 1.1 player at $128 as the base “non-sale” price. The online store is showing it as sold out, but it’s widely available in Walmart brick and mortar stores as well. Enter your zip code into the Find a Store search box to find the nearest to you.
This new low pricing leads me to think that Blu-ray players are going to go for $99 on Black Friday for 2009.
Links:
CNET recently took a look at the Insignia NS-2BRDVD Blu-ray player and gave it a rating of 5.8 out of 10 (2.5 out of 4 stars). The Insignia is a bargain Profile 1.1 player with a starting price under $200. A firmware upgrade coming in March 2009 will make it a Profile 2.0 player.
Although the CNET review summary states that the NS-2BRDVD delivered a solid 1080p HD picture, in fact, it failed most of their image-quality testing. For instance, the player could not depict all the resolution of a text pattern provided by Silicon Optix’s HQV Blu-ray test suite. It also performed poorly in two other picture-quality tests.
Some other characteristics CNET did not like were poor DVD playback quality, slow Blu-ray disc loading, and lack of onboard decodng for Dolby TrueHD DTS-HD.
My first Blu-ray movie was The Dark Knight, a movie filmed with high-def in mind. It was, needless to say, visually spectacular, especially the scenes filmed in IMAX.
Many classic films are now slowly being transferred over to the Blu-ray platform. One of the first classics I tried on Blu-ray was the Godfather series. While the movies had been painstakingly restored for their digital transfers, I have to admit, I am disappointed by their grainy, almost standard-def picture (the movies are still great, though).
I wrote off the quality as the result of the classic film format and thought I should probably focus on modern movies for my high-def experience. And then I watched Patton.
I am utterly astounded by how sharp and vivid the Blu-ray version of the WWII classic is. There are now two movies I would recommend to introduce yourself to Blu-ray with: Kung Fu Panda and Patton.
And as I was watching Patton (a great movie, by the way. 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture), I realized that the movie had never been viewed better than it is today, not even when it was originally shown on the big screen.
If the sharp HD-quality of the picture wasn’t impressive enough, the colors also seemed to pop off the screen. Take, for example, the famous opening scene when General Patton, played by George C. Scott, stands before an American flag and addresses the troops. There are brief close-ups of his hands as he salutes, and you get to see all the incredible detail of a jeweled golden ring he’s wearing as well as the various medals and decorations on his uniform.
Patton is filled with epic shots of battlefields, lavish interiors, desert warfare, and crisp military uniforms, and it all seems as it were originally intended for the high-def experience. It’s a reason to get excited for more classics to come the Blu-ray platform and be seen like never before on the big screen you’ve got at home.
Two main factors convinced me it was time to upgrade to Blu-ray. First, the falling prices of Blu-ray players. Second, the availability of Blu-ray rentals at services like Netflix and Blockbuster. I use Blockbuster Online, because I like that it offers 5 free in-store exchanges (I live less than a block away from a Blockbuster store). These exchanges can be used for Blu-ray discs.
I am incredibly disappointed with Blockbuster Online when it comes to renting Blu-ray movies. Every single Blu-ray movie in my Blockbuster Online queue has a status of Long Wait. For those unfamiliar, popular movies sometimes are in such high demand, they may not be available when their time comes up in your queue. The problem is, even Blu-ray movies that are 3 years old have a Long Wait.
It seems this problem is not confined to Blockbuster Online. Engadget’s Ben Drawbaugh reported similar long waits with his Netflix queue in a post called Is Everyone’s Hi-Def Netflix Queue This Backed Up?
The one saving grace for Blockbuster is the Blu-ray renting experience at its brick-and-mortar stores. Even though the Blu-ray inventory is not as large as DVDs, I haven’t had any problems finding new release Blu-rays.
The long waits for new release Blu-rays makes Blockbuster Online a complete bust for me so far. The one saving grace for the service is the free in-store exchanges. The availability of Blu-ray movies in their brick-and-mortar stores is very good, and it’s the one thing they’re doing right.
