Blu-ray Players Bring Cheap 3D, Great Images, and Internet Services

Five years after their introduction, Blu-ray players have evolved from simple receptacles for video discs to one of the most convenient ways to add the Internet to your television, too. Today, watching streaming video entertainment from Hulu Plus, Netflix, and other services on your television means buying an Internet-capable HDTV or a Blu-ray player. Guess which one is cheaper?

You can also use modern Blu-ray players to view your own photos and videos, as well as to listen to your music collection. And, of course, you can play Blu-ray Discs. Internet streaming keeps improving, but Blu-rays still provide the best moving images and surround sound you can get outside of a real movie theater.

3D Comes Down in Price

A year ago, 3D Blu-ray Disc support was an expensive premium in a Blu-ray player. Not so anymore: Four of the six players can send left and right video streams to your TV--and one of those players, the Insignia NS-WBRDVD3, costs only $120.

Image Quality Boost

Not that those were horrible images. We actually saw surprisingly little variety in image quality with this round. All of the players reproduced colors spot-on. We saw some variation in sharpness and detail, but even those differences were usually minor.

Why is that? As technology improves, the number and quality of the chips required to produce great-looking images goes down, resulting in better image quality at low prices.

Nevertheless, we did see some significant differences, most of them in four of our eight tests. And an interesting four they were.

One was Good Night and Good Luck (chapter 1), our only black-and-white test. Imaging black-and-white video raises issues that seldom come up in color. Grayscale is much more important here, and the eye doesn't get distracted by colors. And some players in this year's roundup found this task harder than their predecessors did in the past.

We also saw noticeable differences between players in The Searchers (chapters 4 and 20), by far the oldest movie we use in testing. It was shot in 1956 in Technicolor and a high-resolution film format called VistaVision. Those two technologies, combined, resulted in more vibrant and highly saturated colors, as well more details, than you find in a modern movie.

Among this test group, the LG BD670 provided the best image quality, surpassing the PlayStation 3 in almost every test involving a Blu-ray Disc. The Panasonic DMP-BDT210 came in a very close second. The Insignia NS-WBRDVD produced the worst images; they looked fine on their own, but when we compared them with the PS3's images, they looked dull and flat.

Internet Trends

As Blu-ray players continue to morph into connected streaming devices, they must keep adding services to stay current. For a couple of years now, it has been all but unthinkable to imagine a new player without Netflix, Pandora, and more than one pay-per-view service. But now you can add Hulu Plus to the must-have list: Five out of the six players we looked at offered it.

All of this Internet use means that consumers are entering more and more text on screen--mostly, service passwords and content searches. But entering text with a conventional remote control is only slightly more easy than typing with your toes.