Blu-ray and HD DVD: The facts

Tip 3: The kit

While it's gradually becoming more affordable, HD DVD and Blu-ray hardware is still very pricey in comparison to standard DVD kit, and as such isn't really aimed at the casual movie fan. For those who want to crank things up a notch on the home-cinema front, however, it's certainly worth investing in a player.

 

HD DVD
HD DVD hardware is the cheaper of the two, with Microsoft's add-on drive for the Xbox 360 available for a mere £130. You will, however, need a £280 console to plug it into, and it doesn't support lossless surround sound at the moment, so it's not the best option available.

More powerful, but still pretty affordable, is the Toshiba HD-E1, which can now be bagged online for just over £250. This lacks a 1080p video output, but its 1080i picture is still beautifully detailed and it does support lossless surround -- but only if you've got an amp with an HDMI input. The main drawback is its sloth-like operating time, which means you'll be waiting around for minutes at a time while the player reluctantly wakes up from standby or ponders loading up a disc.

Blu-ray
The cheapest Blu-ray player around is the PlayStation 3, which costs £425. Home-cinema snobs might balk at using a console to play movies, but it actually delivers a fantastic 1080p picture and is the fastest loading Blu-ray player on the market. It will also output lossless surround sound via an HDMI cable. It's a great-looking piece of kit too, and of course it plays videogames, stores digital media content and lets you browse the Internet, so you're getting a lot for your money.

Panasonic's first Blu-ray player, the DMP-BD10, is a more traditional disc spinner, and its £750 price tag certainly suggests it's aimed at the high-end market. It's a little clunky to use, but outputs a truly glorious 1080p picture thanks to its advanced image-processing technology. It also comes with a 7.1-channel analogue audio output, so it can decode lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD then output it to any receiver.

 

The third way
If you can't decide which of the formats to back, there's one other option available to you: a universal player. LG's £1,000 BH100 is the only one available at present, and while it does play both formats, and has great picture and sound quality, it can't display the menu screens properly on HD DVD discs, so it's hard to find the extras. It also lacks a network port, so getting any of the online extras is also off the menu.

Samsung has announced that its own forthcoming multiformat player, the BD-UP5000, will fully support both formats and have a network connection, so waiting for that is another option. Sadly we have no release date or pricing details at present.

Sony, Pioneer and Philips are among the companies that have Blu-ray players on the way, and as we mentioned in the previous section, there is talk of Chinese manufacturers preparing to unleash a wave of ultra-affordable HD DVD players upon the West.

One thing is for sure -- the hardware will get cheaper, and as the range of movies available in both formats improves, more and more people will be replacing their standard DVD collection with HD movies.