Bluray on a 720p/1080i TV - worth it?

With bluray player prices being so low, I'm thinking it might be time to make the switch. But for now that TV it would be used on is my 7 year old Samsung that is only a 720p/1080i display. So would bluray really be worth it outside a 1080p display?

Compared to what? Compared to streaming, probably not. Even on a 720p TV, Blu-ray will be better than streaming services, but not by so much that it's worth the hassle. Compared to DVD? Yes.

Yeah, not really, most stuff that is streamed in as "HD" is already in 720p. So unless your internet is slow, you probably wouldn't see much of a difference. (or your cable shitty)

I'm talking about compared to DVD, not streaming. There are certain things I have no problem streaming and other things I prefer to have on disk, and not everything I have on disk is available to be streamed anyway.

It's definitely going to be better than DVD, even on a 720p display. Blu-ray Video is encoded at much higher bit-rates and even if the player has to downscale the image from 1080p, the image is going to be sharper and have better saturation and so on.

Yeah, the main deal is that even though you might be sitting far enough away from the screen to not notice much difference in resolution, you're looking at an H.262 MPEG-2 compression if you've got a DVD. The color thinning can be really noticeable depending on the movie.

Fun fact: later model DVD players often used anamorphic widescreen which takes the very low resolution of 720×480 and stretches the vertical picture to fit the entire screen and then lets the TV to squeeze it back down to a standard letterbox format. That's the best a DVD can do.

Compare to 1280x720 and you can see you're getting a little less than three times as many pixels. (345k vs 920k) So yeah...big improvement over DVD in pixel count.

Having said that, I have a BD player you can have. :P I literally own zero BD discs (having given the two I ever owned away) because I can barely care about the difference on my 720p TV. We mostly watch streaming anyway and I don't notice that big of a difference.

So here is another question related to this - is it worth buying the blu-ray versions of movies I already have or will the difference between the upconverted DVD's and true blu-ray not be worth it on a 720p/1080i tv?

That's subjective, but... if I had to make a haphazard guess, I'd say no, it probably isn't worth it. Maybe for some super visual tour de force movie that you watch every year?

I'm mainly trying to decide if I should get the LOTR on blu-ray, a series I do watch pretty regularly and have the extended DVDs for already.

The money-saving way is to find a friend who has it on blu-ray, borrow it, and see if it makes enough of a difference for you.

There is a big difference in picture quality, even if you ignore the pixel difference. DVDs don't do darker scenes very well, or actually any scene with a lot of contrast. It's worth switching to bluray for just the better range of colour.

See? BD is so good, you get colour instead of color.

Firefly and Serenity I bought on DVD when they first released and then later got the Blu-ray versions. It's not really much of a comparison for me - the Blu-ray shots look like someone removed a thin layer of gauze from the DVD video, just one that you maybe didn't notice much before but can't not notice once you've seen the difference.

To follow-up on this, I went ahead and got a blu-ray player and LOTR BD. Having watched Fellowship only so far, I have to say I'm not sure I see much of an improvement. Granted, I have not done a side by side comparison yet and haven't watched the DVD version recently enough that it is fresh in my mind, but other then a few scenes that seemed a little bit clearer, my general impression was that I haven't gained much.

Which makes me now want to upgrade the TV. Damnit.

Heh, I had the sneaking suspicion that if you hadn't updated your TV, you probably aren't a big videophile guy, and probably wouldn't notice =)

The TV is fine for a lot of HD content. On something like a football game it is clearly a better picture then a non-HD TV. To some extent it was probably already making DVDs look better. I was just hoping for more from BD but I guess I need 1080p.

How large is the TV and how far away do you sit when watching it? Resolution is only half the story if your limiter is actually what your eyes can resolve.