Make Your Mark: The Insignia™ Blog

By Kyle Melnick

Blu-ray: you know it’s the best way to watch movies at home, but do you know why? Well, if you own a 1080p HDTV and want to use it to its full potential, Blu-ray is the truest form of 1920 x 1080p resolution, and additionally delivers the crispest audio with Dolby TrueHD 5.1. A Blu-ray player will also play nice with your existing DVD collection, upconverting the picture to hi-definition.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. With a hard line Ethernet cord or built-in wi-fi capabilities, a lot of today’s Blu-ray players are delivering hi-definition content via the internet. Once you’re connected, you’ll have access to the emerging world of Blu-ray widgets-- one of the fastest growing industries-- and you will be able to connect to your Netflix account to watch hi-def movies on-demand, access additional exclusive content for Blu-rays, link to Pandora to listen to your favorite music on your home theater system as well as provide your system with the latest firmware updates to ensure you have the latest features. Insignia Blu-ray players actually come preloaded with BD-Live, Netflix, and Pandora. BD-Live is really neat – it lets you access special content on a wide range of select blu-ray movies, like behind the scenes commentary, interactive games and much more!

A few pointers if you’re looking to ditch your DVD player and bag a Blu-ray:

• Make sure you remember to pick up an HDMI cable, as many Blu-ray players don’t come with one in the box. Any other connection to your TV will result in a loss of picture quality
• If a newly released Blu-ray doesn’t work on your player, make sure your firmware is up-to-date. If your Blu-ray player doesn’t connect to the internet, you should still be able to download the update on your computer, put it on a flash drive, plug it into the Blu-ray player and update it that way. Firmware updates also make sure you can get the latest bonus content on BD-Live.
• Finally, you owe it to yourself to get a Blu-ray player that allows you to fully enjoy one of the action packed movies like Transformer, Avatar or Ironman. All you need to do then is just turn all the lights off and really enjoy the movie! When you do Blu-ray right, you’ll wonder how you could have ever sat and watched a DVD.