b&B co-founder brent Johnson and guest blogger ryan hutchins debate the awesomeness of blu-ray …
“Hey Blu-Ray… You Get Your Goddamn Hands Off Her!”
By Brent Johnson
Blu-ray makes me angry. I don’t even like looking at the stupid, shrunken blue boxes when I walk through Best Buy, searching for DVDs. 
I get it: The picture is supposedly, like, super better. You can see Bruce Willis’ nose hair. And I appreciate advances in technology. The cell phone is awesome.
But the major reason Blu-ray makes me angry is that I already spent hundreds buying the perfectly good, sleek, comfortable technology of DVDs — within the last decade. I don’t want to have to re-buy As Good As It Gets so soon again, for a technology I don’t think is THAT much of an improvement.
CDs were a major step over LPs. No dust, no crackles, much easier to store. DVDs were a major step over VHS. Less wear and tear, no rewinding, much easier to store. But Blu-ray? It looks better, but it’s not a major step — and it’s also more expensive for now.
My good colleague Ryan Hutchins will make at least one point I agree with: You can play regular DVDs on Blu-ray players. So I guess you could buy a Blu-ray player, keep your old DVDs and just buy Blu-ray discs from now on. That’s not too bad.
But it feels like I am trying to be forced into re-buying my beloved collection of Digital Video Discs. It’s the principal, dammit.
P.S. — Hey Blu-ray manufacturers: One way to maybe get stubborn people like me to switch over? Put more special features and cool booklets in the Blu-rays. I’m a sucker for that. It’s honestly what made me attracted to DVDs in the first place. Good day.
________________________________________________________________________________
Hooray Blu-Ray
By Ryan Hutchins
While opponents of Blu-ray offer simple, pedestrian arguments, a reasonable person cannot discount the points that are made. Yes, most of us did spend the 1990s and 2000s building DVD collections. Yes, a new technology means buying a new device and spending more money. 
But those opponents fail to take into account the gravity of a full, mainstream marketing of a new product like Blu-ray. To dismiss Blu-ray under the assumption that it will go the way of the 8-track, or because it represents an unwelcomed cost, doesn’t consider a simple reality: market acceptance is a key factor in technological progression.
By comparison, such attitudes, if applied to the music world, would have lead to a stagnant music culture serving little purpose. If in 1954, when the world heard rock n’ roll for the first time, young people took the same attitude of the old, then the world itself may have turned out to be a different place. In the way that music recording has progressed since 1877 — from discs and cylinders to CDs and MP3s — so, too, must the technology used for video playback.
Blu-ray is in every way a superior product to the DVD — boasting more than twice the resolution — and its only rival, HD DVD, has already been killed. Those who dismiss Blu-ray do so with the constitution of an elderly person dismissing computers or cell phones.
Gotta say, until BluRay gives me something beyond an incrementally better picture that my eyes aren’t nuanced enough to notice/appreciate, I’m with Brent on this one. It doesn’t present enough of an advancement to be worth it for me – not to say it won’t eventually take over, but as with most new technology, that will happen when its incremental costs line up more accurately with its incremental benefits.
This was a great column..I agree blue ray is not a necessary upgrade but if they would add like a feature where you can watch the movie with the director or cast and discuss the film the day it comes out I think that would be big enough for me to switch. BlueRay needs to provide more of an experience besides just the movie and some deleted scenes.
The fact that you can play both on a Blue Ray is cool but the extra money charged for the DVD ??? Just a point CD’s may have been easier to collect and maintain but they sure ain’t got the same sound. Compare the two and you will see that vinyl sounds a whole lot better.