KIND OF BLU-RAY

Oh dear… It seems I did a bad thing…

And the funny thing is that, even though it cost only just over six of your British pounds, and seemed to be a complete bargain at that ridiculously low price, even when I clicked that “buy now” icon, I knew that it was a bad thing and that, when it arrived, I would probably be in a great deal of trouble for wasting my money on something that, to all intents and purposes, I had already bought three times over, twice on video, and once again on DVD…

Although, to be fair, one of those times wasn’t actually me, but these kinds of things do happen when you combine your lives and your film collections…

But you see I did say that I wasn’t going to get sucked into this shiny new format, and that I really couldn’t see the point of it. After all, no matter what film it is, it’s still the same movie, whatever format that it’s released on. A bad film, with a lousy script and some awful performances in it, isn’t going to get any “better” just because it’s on Blu-Ray, (although the ones I bought are none of those...)

And I guess that it’s going to be a dead format pretty soon anyway, given that new computing devices seem to be moving away from having disk drives and the average consumer is happy enough to steam any old quality of nonsense...

But ever since I got the wretched device, for reasons I once described to you that did not involve the playing of any shiny discs whatsoever, I have kind of been intrigued as to quite how different the images viewed upon it might actually look.

I could, of course, have just rented something to find that out, but then this “bargain” popped up… and it was one of my favourites (actually, it was four of my favourites…) … and it is one of the very few films that I could honestly say with any certainty that I’d probably watch over again more than once…

I have, of course, been trying to persuade anyone who’ll listen (i.e. not very many people at all) that Blu-Ray really does seem to be a format too far, that it serves no purpose unless you have the kind of TV set of the size which could entertain an arena, and that it seems anachronistic and will probably go the way of the Betamax videotape any day now, but such is my utter hypocrisy that I have now, in a small way, been sucked into its clutches and must resist the urge to buy everything that I already own and fail to re-watch on yet another format…

To be fair, in most cases, I am finding it very easy to resist, but I have now crossed a rubicon and the marketing bots know of this chink in the armour of my fortress and they will no doubt be doing their level best to gnaw away at my shallowness and suck me in to their horrific world of exponential sales potential.

We have, after all, been here before.

Those early days of the original shiny discs when I said that I’d just get one to “see what they look like…” which turned into an obsessive surge of acquisition…

But those were wealthier days, and the novelty of all those “interesting” extras gave me more reasons to find excuses to persuade myself that such things were “essential” in some small way, but, apart from an improved picture quality that I can barely perceive, what additional improvement can this relatively new format give me that all of the shiny discs that I already have can’t…?

And so the internal battle commences…