Blu-ray players produce pictures at the highest level of quality, but you’ll need to do a little fine-tuning to achieve optimum results. Here, we present a few handy tips.

Just putting in the disc and pressing “Play” won’t always guarantee perfect results. A bit of fine-tuning will help tease the best picture from your player and TV.

Introduction

People used to go the cinema if they wanted to enjoy a big, high-quality picture and surround sound. But since Blu-ray’s arrival, you can also create the cinema atmosphere within your own four walls. Experts increasingly doubt whether cinemas can deliver better video and audio than you’ll find in a high-quality home cinema. Chemical film might still have the upper hand in terms of colour gamut, but digital home cinemas display finer shading and perfectly balanced pictures — in theory, at least.

No matter how perfect the new medium might be in theory, results can vary widely in practice. On the one hand, this depends on the Blu-ray disc in question — there can be significant differences in picture and sound quality from one disc to the next. Not all discs use the highest resolution, and therefore not all produce ultra-sharp pictures; many discs use transfers with poor contrast and incorrect colours. On top of that, the studios often cut corners in the authoring, reducing the bit rate of the recorded material — this results in annoying block artefacts and video noise. We’ve even heard of cases where they simply sharpened and up-scaled the DVD master.

Some devices sold as “high-end”, even just a few years ago, lack support for the new signal types — a problem that can lead to further losses of quality. There are many points in the process that offer second-best and even third-best solutions, but if it’s top-quality results you’re looking for, only first-best will do.