A couple years ago you couldn’t grab a Blu-ray movie for under $30. If you did, it was a rarity. Finally the movie makers and marketers went back to their DVD marketing prowess with nice “buy me” pricing versus the high Blu-ray movie premiums they were trying to get away with before.

Now you can find movies even for as low $5, and not just the garbage movies. Great works like Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes and more can be added in all their studio master quality audio and video nirvana for just a few smackers.

What’s the huge deal? Blu-ray offers studio master quality video and sound quality. What that means is you can’t really get better quality, and thus you won’t need to ever re-purchase the movie unless time or wear forces a replacement.

When a new video format such as Blu-ray comes out, it truly is never fully out until the Star Wars saga is released on the format. This may initially sound like over-hyped bullocks, but it truly is not. When coveted pop culture movies come out, more people embrace new video formats to see their favorite films of all time like never before.

So mark your calendar for Sept 16 in the US (and four days prior internationally) because the Star Wars saga is coming to Blu-ray!

Let’s Take a Step Back…
The Star Wars franchise has had amajor impact in regards to movie theater technology and thus the home theater market as well.

Growing up in the 80’s this movie became an instant sci-fi classic I watched year after year. I never actually saw it in the movie theater, but rather on VHS. The visual effects were good in as far as computer graphics could go at the time versus the models used for the Star Wars movies that predated The Last Star Fighter. It was groundbreaking then as 3D computer graphics really weren’t used at this level before. They literally invented many advances in 3D computer animation technology to make this film.

These two high-definition DVD formats have been battling for a couple years now and after living with HD-DVD for the better part of a year I can honestly say I’m not impressed. The image and sound is better on HD-DVD than on standard DVD, but not so much so that I’m willing to spend 2-3 times as much on new releases for the benefit. At $30-$40 per new release movie, the value proposition just fails. With every movie not available on both high-def formats, I’ll be watching my standard DVD collection for a long time.