Terminator 2 arrived yesterday on Blu Ray. I’ve been looking forward to trying out a Blu Ray movie and T2 is apparently one of the best available in terms of picture and sound quality. Certainly, you get the full 1.5Mbps DTS sound track in comparison to the 640kps Dolby Digital sound track. Video quality is also very good, you get wonderfully crisp and sharp pictures with lots of colour. You’ll spot the film grain from the original film, but that’s something that’s always going to be apparent in HD, unless the Movie was originally filmed on a Digital camera, which is starting to happen more an more, though many directors still prefer film. Don’t confuse the lines in the picture below as film grain, that’s just the result of photographing a TV screen.

The thing is, just like HDTV, the picture does look better than DVD, but it’s not knock-your-socks-off, blow-your-mind better. You won’t see the difference in video quality that you saw going from VHS to DVD, and as such I find it hard to see the masses flocking to either HD-DVD or Blu Ray in favour of DVD. Instead I see it as a format that only the most dedicated gadget lovers will buy, just like SACD and DVD-Audio, both of which ended up failing to replace CD. Still, I’d love to be proven wrong, and I’m rooting for Blu Ray over HD-DVD for no reason other than I have a Blu Ray player in my PS3. Check out the images below for a comparison (click to enlarge).