Blu‐ray is the dominant format for viewing high-definition movies.

Sony created Blu‐ray — also seen as “bluray” — to provide content for high definition televisions and projectors. In 2006, Toshiba launched HD-DVD, a competing high-definition format,just a few months before Blu‐ray’s debut. This lead to a format war, and caused a lot of confusion for consumers.

Fortunately, after around 18 months, sales of Blu‐ray outpaced HD‐DVD and Toshiba conceded defeat; Blu‐ray was crowned the victor and became the natural successor to DVD.

Compared to DVD, Blu‐ray has superior sound and video when used with compatible high definition televisions. Picture quality will be improved using HD‐Ready TVs, but it’s seen at its best using Full HD equipment (either televisions or projectors.)

Blu-ray was designed to improve on DVD’s picture quality - this became more important as TV screens increased in size, with 42˝ screens becoming common-place. Blu-ray is a great choice for people looking for the best picture quality; prices for Blu-ray players (including Sony’s PlayStation 3 ) are coming down, and Blu-ray movies are available at half the price they were when new.

Important: Like DVD before it, Blu-ray uses a region coding scheme to prevent encoded discs from one geographic area being used in another. This is important to bear in mind when buying over the Internet!

See our Blu-ray guide to Region Coding for more information.