Blu ray, can I make it look better?

[Shadnic]

I don't know about you guys, but what really sold me on blu ray was seeing them on display TV's in stores, and some of them just have an AMAZINGLY crisp and jaw-dropping look to them. I wasn't sure if it was the TV hardware that allows that, or the specific blu ray player, but I decided to splurge a tiny bit and get a blu ray drive for my computer.

My specs should be just fine for watching blu ray (Core i5-750, 2.66 GHz, EVDA GTX 275 896mb, 4gb ram, etc). My monitor is not the most expensive thing in the world (actually it was on sale for pretty cheap), but it's full 1920x1080, and video games/hi res pictures look fantastic on it. Colors pop, everything looks crisp, refresh rate is 5ms, brightness is high...etc

Now I downloaded a trial of Cyberlink PowerDVD9 to watch a blu ray movie. I picked Pirates of the Caribbean because of its big pretty oceany scenes and great image quality. The movie looked good...but I wasn't "wow'd" by any means. There were a few scenes where I felt like I was really watching a blu ray, but for the most part, it was pretty underwhelming and it didn't look so much different from just a DVD.

Is there anything I can do to improve video quality of Blu rays on my PC? Is it all limited by hardware? I'd appreciate any help at all, thanks for reading! And sorry this is under graphics cards, the only other place that seemed appropriate was home theater, but this is more of a computer thing, so I was thought I may get more answers here.

 

[OvrClkr]

Your hardware is more than enough for flawless BD playback. You don't need any 3rd party software to play BD files or movies. You can use Windows Media player and Quicktime among others. My suggestion would be to try using Quicktime and compare or stream the movie from this site :

http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/piratesofthecaribbeanatworldsend/

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/player/

Let us know if you saw any difference at all....

One of my PC's is not even close to what you have and it plays 1080p just fine....Hope this helps....

 

[Sean John]

Yup, hardware looks good to go.

Maybe you just got used to how amazing it looks on HDTV. It's mostly a matter of perception.

Generally, ANY blu-ray movie played on any capable system will give you very nice display. But some HDTVs really have nice tones and colors compared to some PC displays.

Maybe it is somewhat down to your expectations. First time I ran a Blu-ray movie, I was amazed, and it was on a monitor smaller than yours.