Blu-ray Players currently available

Blu-ray Players currently available

Standalone Blu-ray players are available from a large number of electronics manufacturers, including Sony, LG, Samsung, Panasonic and Sharp. Sony's standalone Blu-ray players are currently the most popular models on the market. The advantages of using a standalone Blu-ray player over the PS3 is that these are usually quieter (near silent). Standalones could also offer better analog output, and may also offer decoding and bitstreaming of high definition audio formats (whereas the PS3 will not bitstream).

However, the disadvantages of a standalone Blu-ray player against a PS3 are numerous, such as the lack of ability to upgrade software profiles, and as the PS3 has supercomputer powers, it loads Blu-ray discs more quickly than the lesser computing power of standalone Blu-ray players.

Game Consoles
The Sony PS3 comes with Blu-ray playback and sometimes with a free Blu-ray movie as well! It is an excellent Blu-ray player with quicker loading compared to the less powerful standalone Blu-ray players, and the operation is fairly quiet.

The PS3 also offers DVD upscaling to an excellent quality, although there are better upscalers on the market which use the Reon VX chipset. It is also important to ensure you purchase separately the PS3 Blu-ray remote (the official one), which will make your Blu-ray experience much better.

The issues we have outlined here including software profiles and loading speed are important to your whole Blu-ray experience, so decide which of these criteria are most important to you before deciding which Blu-ray player to choose.

Computer Based Players
There are now more PCs and laptops than ever before on the market which have a Blu-ray drive pre-installed. The Sony Vaio and Dell XPS laptops both have pre-installed Blu-ray drives. Most large PC manufacturers will now allow you to add a Blu-ray drive to new computer systems. If you’re technically minded, you can also build your own by buying a Blu-ray drive. Drives are available from Asus/Lite-on/Pioneer and Sony, and LG are currently offering dual format drives.

Computer based playback has some strict hardware requirements, including a fast CPU, lots of RAM and a HDCP enabled graphics card and monitor. Currently, PowerDVD Ultra from Cyberlink, WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray from Corel and Arcsoft Totalmedia Theatre are the players of choice available for PCs.