If anyone has already made the leap and wants to recommend a player, I'm all ears.

And to be honest, I never used to watch DVDs and think, "If only the quality was better."

Plus Blu-Rays don't sound particularly good. I've got a decent stereo telly (it's 'full HD') and I've fiddled with all kinds of settings but still I get the same problem with most Blu Ray discs: the explosions and music are deafening but I have to hike up the volume to hear the dialogue.

I mean, I don't want to put anybody off, but it certainly wasn't the audio-visual revolution I was expecting.

For the right release i think blu-ray is significantly better than standard dvd. I guess its all in the eye of the beholder but the picture quality is, on a good transfer, far richer and more vibrant. As for the sound, as long as your system is properly wired up and then the channels are balanced is also better than dvd.
particular discs to recommend are Up, Hellboy 2, Gladiator but suprisingly also the BBCs recent Bleak House - you can get the whole series for a tenner and the quality is outstanding.

The pain is the really irritating load times and the disc cost - but they are getting cheaper

The Sony-BDP-S760 is pretty good,full wireless connectivity for firmware upgrades ect. and it cuts loading times down,great picture on Blu-Ray and D.V.D but where it really shines is sonically.

I picked up the Sony BDP S350 Blu-ray player from Richer Sounds for just over £150 last year, and it's fab; I was very pleased with my purchase. I bought it specifically for the up-scaling capability (and it was in a sale, and was also chipped for multi-region DVD discs). It's a machine I would genuinely recommend to anyone looking to enter the realms of Blu-ray.

I held off on upgrading to Blu-ray for a while, as I resented having to go back to spending £20 on discs having seem DVDs drop to around £12. I felt like the Blu-ray thing was a swizz. However, if you can afford to go for something like this Sony Blu-ray player, with up-scaling on the normal DVDs, that will give you the best of both worlds.

The up-scaling means you get crisper general DVD picture, and to be honest, as a result I'm not as obsessive about seeing things exclusively on Blu-ray. That said, I generally go for Blu-rays if it's something I especially interested in seeing. Let The Right One In on Blu-ray was amazing, and when I get out of unemployment I shall be buying that disc on Blu-ray. Equally, I've watched several films that I thought were average, but which held my attention avidly simply because the Blu-ray picture was so sharp. Cases in point: State of Play (with Russell Crow) and The International (Clive Owen).

I'm a member of Lovefilms, so rent most of my movies, so I pick and choose amongst the formats. If I get the ones I want on Blu-ray it just adds a bit more joy to the viewing. If not, no big deal.

In five years time another format will come along which promises yet clearer pictures... and another will follow that and so on to infinity...

Personally I see no reason not to stick with DVD... they're good enough for me. I still rejoice in not having to rewind tape and being able to play the 'freeze Jo Grant knickers shots' game whilst watching Doctor Who...

I tend to agree with Patrick and succumbed to Blu Ray as I still feel its an interim solution - and this is from someone who had Laserdiscs and full Dobly surround before Home Cinema was popular.

My feeling is that downloaded HD video streamed around the house from a hard drive server is the answer. Its there to a certain degree now - I have an Apple TV setup and iTunes has some HD content (albeit at only 720P) available. if they could get rid of this DRM crap, bump up the resolution to 1080P and improve the audio on the Apple TV (its only standard Dobly 5.1) then that would be perfect. Its all still in its infancy but bandwidths are increasing, so its only a matter of time before video goes the same way as music.....

I only have a few dvds and half of them were given away free with the paper. How do these new tellys look with HD tv broadcasts? I was round a friends recently and was less than impressed watching sport on his wide screen but this I think was his virgin box which blurred some of the action and had quite a bad pixel problem (I think he has a panasonic).
Do people use downloaded films as this seems like a good idea saving filling yourselves with more boxes and not tying yourself to bluray etc?

I get a signed piece of paper telling me this is the last thing they'll ever invent.

it'll be 3D green-ray next, Pah!

in audio imho is the rather nice cable sock

http://www.divineaudio.co.uk/cable-accessories/loewe-cable-tidy-sock-sil...

that Loewe produce-we are talking nicely to our local dealer and expect to make use of quite a bit-I am resigned to at least a 3 box system (hard disk recorder, multiregion dvd player, and all in one hifi) + laptop and iPod dock in my flat for quite a while yet.

Will post a picture when I'm feeling brave ...

..was some new speaker cable. Surprisingly cheap oxygen-free biwire stuff, taking over from my old enormous copper ribbons. Amazing difference in sound. I was wondering if my old Eltaxes were getting a bit tired but it would seem not.

The film itself is okay but episodic (in a bad way), poorly paced, overall a bit pointless and aimless, and the ending was dragged out way too far. Also how come the bomb disposal people are such good snipers? This year must have been a weak year for films if that won best director and best picture Oscars. Also it is dwarfed by the superior Generation Kill TV show. Truly film is the poor cousin to TV nowadays.

If I had watched it on DVD my viewing experience would have been exactly the same. Blu-Ray added nothing of the experience. And it didn't help us see more during the night time scenes with all those chunks of pure black.

YOU STOP COUNTING PIXELS AFTER FIVE MINUTES. It becomes irrelevant as you start paying attention to the acting, story, camera angles etc and the fuzzy picture or colour bleed etc become invisible. Anyone still scanning the picture for soft edges an hour into a film is NOT watching the film.

Stick with buying DVDs if they are cheaper.

I'm using the stereo speakers from my TV and I have no problem with the lossless Blu-Ray soundtracks. Some movies have extreme dynamics with the dialogue mixed much lower than the explosions etc, which can be irritating. All you can do is keep changing the volume between the action and talking scenes. It's not a major hardship and technically it's a good thing that the soundtrack hasn't been compressed like modern CDs.

I have to say the 'sound' issue has not bothered me so far - surely the answer is to select the appropriate sound option from the DVD/Blu-Ray setup menu - ie 5.1 if you are appropriately kitted out, stereo if not?

Or is that too simplistic an approach?

In any event I would be loath to shell out the best part of another grand on the audio, even if the FPO was happy to have speakers and wires all over the place (which she isn't).

for the Neil Young archives vol.1

I bought a Sony Blu-Ray from Richer sounds just after Christmas for about £100, and I've got to say it's one of my better purchases. Discs can be picked up quite reasonably on Amazon (about £10 for an older disc £15 for a new release, and amazingly £17.99 for the Band of Brothers box set). Some classic films, North by Northwest, Casablanca and early Bond films look absolutely fantastic on Blu. A good site for Blu Ray reviews is http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/reviews.html
Generally they tell you whether a disc is worth upgrading from DVD to Blu ray, which has saved me a few quid.

to go into details and everything seems to have been covered by the Massive.I concur wholeheartedly about Richer Sounds,always found them helpful.Audio-Visual is in essence no different to Hi-Fi,You get what you pay for pretty much.What you have to ask yourself is this.If you've forked out for a good Hi-Def T.V. do you want to get the best out of your investment?If yes,bite the bullet and go the whole hog,good sound is essential.You should be able to install an A.V.Amp and speaker package with speaker cables and Two HDMI's for under £2000.Good sound reproduction is if anything more of a revelation than an improvement to the picture.Take some time to set the picture and sound calibration correctly.Pixar discs have a screen calibration suite included in the extras,USE THEM!Most decent A.V Amps come bundled with a microphone which you connect to the Amp to calibrate the sound,a piece of cake to do,honest.As for the debate over D.V.D or Blu-Ray,I buy new releases on Blu-Ray and I've replaced some D.V.D's with new copies on the new medium if it improves my enjoyment of the film,easily the most startling improvement has been John Carpenter's The Thing,until seeing it on Blu-Ray I had no idea it was such a visually vibrant movie.Hope this helps and happy viewing.

It all depends on what you want to watch, just like with what music you listen to. If all you ever listen to is Engelbert Humperdink and his ilk then don't spend more than £29.99 on a 'hi-fi'. The industry will always try to get you to spend more than you initially wanted to, and they can only stay in business if they keep 'inventing' new products and persuade us we want them.
Blu-Ray and/or HD is good for fast action like sport; there's no delay in the pixels. It's also better where the detail is important like natural history. But for run of the mill stuff, don't bother. As for the sound, you're always at the mercy of the engineers who mixed it, and if it's a Marlon Brando film you should just give up on the dialogue anyway.
It will always be the case that the best place to watch films is at the cinema and the best place to hear music is at a live gig.

that in haste I was confusing some of Albert Edward's postings with Paul Waring's-sorry.

In summary I think I wanted to say that from personal experience Blu Ray can look & sound v good indeed-hence my wish to encourage AE to hear a better sound system; and to say that it is possible that the cheaper sound projectors/clip-on speakers that fall within PW's budget *might* be worth it compared to his TV speakers, but that he has to hear them to be sure. If it's possible to just play it through an existing stereo as others have suggested that's almost certainly worth an experiment-it's what I do in my flat.

At the FPO's place over 10ish years we have used, consecutively, her Nakamichi DVD player into Onkyo Liverpool midi stereo, then my Pioneer DVD/SACD player into an Arcam AVR 350 AV receiver, and now her Pioneer Blu-Ray player into that amp (newer hi def sound formats are decoded in the player and send as multichannel analogue to the amp). Each stage has been a very noticeable step up in sound. However we share the general dissatisfaction with lack of upgradeability etc-this was once something that Arcam would do for you with many of their amps for example.

I don't know about the rest of you but the menus of my old DVDs don't seem to work as well on my Blu-ray player.

... I've been very impressed with Blu Ray in general ever since I bought my PS3 about eighteen months ago. Where it really becomes worthwhile, for me, is in some of the excellent releases of archive titles, that you really wouldn't expect to look brilliant in their full-on restored, HD glory - but they do.

'Casablanca', 'How the West Was Won', the early Connery Bond films, 'The Pink Panther'... all vintage titles I've bought which look utterly brilliant on Blu Ray. Obviously newer stuff looks great too, but you'd expect that, wouldn't you?