Audio Video News

After a slow start, sales of Blu-ray players have passed a couple of significant milestones. They're selling better than DVD players and VCRs did at equivalent moments in their histories.

A recent New York Times story is loaded with good news. Three years after the format's debut, Blu-ray players are in seven percent of American homes, and that excludes sales of Blu-compatible Sony PlayStation3 game consoles. Over on Amazon, eight of the top ten bestselling disc players are Blu-ray, and five of the top ten bestselling discs are BDs.

Pricing seems to have done the trick, with entry-level players falling below $50 (try plugging "magnavox blu-ray player" into the Google Shopping engine). It probably doesn't hurt that 40 percent of TVs sold are 1080p, playing to Blu's high-def strength. Networked features, such as streaming from Netflix and other program suppliers, may be helping too. Some might argue that streaming is a Trojan horse at the gates, but given the sorry state of broadband in the U.S., that threat may be overstated.

Anyway, if you haven't yet bought a Blu-ray player, now's the time to go for it. Make sure you get Profile 2.0 (BD-Live) and decoding for both DolbyTrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio--even a brand-new model like the Magnavox NB530MGX, pictured, may still be Profile 1.1, which would omit increasingly desirable interactive features. You'll also need 5.1- or 7.1-channel analog outputs if your old receiver isn't HDMI 1.3 compliant.