"DVD looks good enough for me" may come out of your mouth before you've actually seen the difference first-hand, but once you do, there's no going back. There are a bunch of advantages that aren't necessarily apparent at first.
Blu-ray is a giant leap forward in a few respects and an agreeable do-over on some of DVD's biggest failings. Reliable, full 1080p HD streaming is still a ways off because ISPs in the States just can't manage the bandwidth. Anyone with HD cable or satellite gone a solid week without image artifacts or a delayed signal? I didn't think so. Broadcast HD is 720p, 1080i at best. Discs are here to stay for some time yet.
A League of Its Own
Pretty Pictures, Splendid Sounds
Anyone who tells you that up-converted DVD looks just about as good as a Blu-ray, like the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore, is out of their mind or has a vision impairment. Video and audio quality are the biggest improvements over DVD, and if a Blu-ray doesn't blow you away in these areas compared to its DVD counterpart, someone messed up big-time. In-store displays don't often do either picture or audio justice by being badly-configured or by virtue of not running over HDMI, so you can't necessarily trust them.
Finer detail in crowd scenes, clothing patterns, items in the background, and just sharper focus in scenes involving fast motion, smoke, fire, and dust are among the various things that you really pick up on with HD picture. You see freckles on Dorothy Gale, individual leaves instead of a blur in Zemeckis' aerial shots in Forrest Gump, and if you think Pixar DVDs look great, get ready for a wake-up call. Lossless audio means you can expect that analog hiss to disappear in more and more catalog titles (though it's annoyingly still there in a few). If you have a nice surround setup, channels will be more vivid and crisp than before.
Restoring Justice
Warner Bros. recently, and very expensively, remastered The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind for DVD. WB then had to re-remaster both for Blu-ray because they restored to the resolution they needed for standard definition, with HD formats not even nascent yet. In order for all the studios to not embarrass themselves, they're all going back and re-cleaning and transferring catalog titles for HD. The smart studios are pouring a bunch of money into getting higher quality than they need now so that VOD and higher-resolution formats will be easier to transition to in the future. They know they can't pass on the cost to the consumer in an economy like the one we're steeped in, so premium picture quality is more affordable and stunning than it was just four years ago.
More Satisfying Materialism
Premium-Feel Packaging
I like that the cases are shorter and slimmer for single discs, and that a 6-disc set no longer sits 6 inches wide on my shelf. A full season set of a TV show is slim, sleek, and feels densely-packed. The buttons that hold the disc in the case are uniform across different studio releases, and they hold the discs tightly in place. As a bonus, they aren't so strong that you risk breaking the damn disc in half when you want to take it out. The disc coating is thicker and more scratch-resistant, so buying secondhand won't be the potential horror show roll of the dice that it is with DVD.
Pricing
Prices have come plummeting down over the last year, and we're finally at the point that the market will adopt the format en masse (so the studios hope). The higher gigabyte quantity of data and better DRM assures studios that piracy will be harder, so they're making the discs affordable more quickly. I recently got The Wild Bunch, Being There, and The Searchers for under $9 apiece. Criterion Blu-rays are generally priced lower than their DVD counterparts. In fact, most of them are currently $19.99 on Amazon to match a Barnes & Noble sale, including the now out of print The Third Man (temporarily out of stock, but they say they're still getting them).
Region Freedom
Lots and lots of overseas discs are now all-region coded. Most of the titles hitting Japan and China non-locked, but some juicy UK/European ones are Region B-locked. I posted a piece back in July about the Region Coding landscape. It's still accurate, so give it a look if you're interested. I'm planning to interview a pal who's the most prolific importer I know for a future installment. He'll shed some light on best places to purchase and pricing.
What's Not So Great
Loading, Loading....Jesus H. Christ, Still Loading...
Load times are much longer than DVD, even with the newest players. The 2-3 minute delay is something you get used to by popping the disc in, making popcorn, taking a shower, and waxing the car while waiting. This is by far the biggest annoyance of the format, but all hyperbole aside, I pass the time pouring a drink and it's like it never happened. It still bothers me regardless.
Digital/Managed Copies
In the arena of added cost, any title that includes a Digital Copy suitable for playing on portable devices has some additional cost built in to the sticker price. These Digital Copy codes usually expire, so at some point the discs they come with will get cheaper because the code's no good anymore.
On top of that, you never know which players or operating systems these things work on. The Reno! 911 Season 6 set works only on a Windows computer and not really any portable devices, negating its usefulness. There's a new, recently-ratified Managed Copy standard that doesn't require connecting to iTunes or PlaysForSure or anything, but it isn't supported by any of the current players on the market.
BD-Living Dead
I really, really hate BD-Live. I would love for that to change over time, but that's where I'm at currently and for the foreseeable future. Regardless of which studio the disc came from or which disc you're using, BD-Live is slow, times out, or just doesn't work.
The prerequisite for doing BD-Live is that your player is somehow connected to the internet. Most people don't have ethernet in their living room, and wireless-enabled players (that aren't a PS3) are only now hitting the market and aren't cheap. I guarantee that most of the bundled or price-slashed players that will be sold this holiday season will not have wifi capability.
The biggest problem is that there's no visionary innovation behind BD-Live at all. Paramount is trying to do some downloadable featurette stuff with their Star Trek TOS sets, and they require the Blu-ray to be in the drive to play them. It incentivizes ownership, which is understandable, and it's nice that, theoretically, new extras won't require buying a new double dip every 18 months. The problem is, these 28 megabyte files take over five minutes to download, which is insane.
Fox has started including Live Lookup on its most recent releases. It's an IMDb-connected feature that allows you to answer "what did I see that guy in" without grabbing a computer or phone to get online and look it up. As shrug-worthy as that sounds, it's one of the few well-designed, fast, and useful BD-Live features developed to this point. That is part of the problem: there's no killer app or anything approaching it. BD-Live is the most broken, worthless thing about Blu-ray, but honestly it has nothing to do with the primary function of your setup: playing movies.
The HD Guide is an ongoing series focusing on the evolving world of HD in the home: getting started, understanding the lingo, and appreciating the best (and worst) discs that are out there.