Feeling Blu

Last night, I tried out my first Blu-ray movie. Blu-ray is Sony's latest try at a digital medium- kinda like DVD but not, it has many times the storage space of regular dvds, with a single-sided BD-rom having 25GBs of space. The Blu-ray disc is the medium being used for PS3 games, and for Hi-definition movies coming from, of course, Sony. Well, since I had a Blu-ray player in the form of my new PS3, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Instead of getting some expensive but mediocre PS3 game, I'd be better off getting a Blu-ray disc of a good movie and seeing the loveliness of HD cinema.

Well, I got X-Men: The Last Stand or X3, the final chapter of the Marvel Mutants series of films. I had originally planned on getting Underworld Evolution, but the store didn't have it on stock. Well, naked Rebecca Romjin is just as good as a naked Kate Beckinsale, so why not. The movie, as expected, looks incredible... there is crisp detail in everything, more so on a fine HD TV. Scenes seemed to be more 'alive' than on regular TV or even on the DVD version of the film, with deeper colors and finer detail in stuff like hair and characters' skin. The movie still ends the same though. Unfortunately, the pounding bass of the soundtrack was lost on my non-5.1 speaker TV... hopefully I'll be able to hook up my components to take full advantage of the multi-channel sounds. Someday.

Disappointingly, the 25 Gigs of Blu-ray space wasn't taken up by any extras that weren't in the DVD version... a couple of commentaries and a gaggle of deleted/alternate scenes was pretty much it. But well, it's a fine film to show off great visuals and really, X3 is a pretty cool movie to have a HD copy of.

Will BD take over the world, or will it fall to HD-DVD and go the way of Beta? Only time and the PS3 will tell.