Quote:

Originally Posted by fierce_gt 


how much are you paying to rent?
it costs me about the same amount to buy, I just wait til they hit the clearance bin.

for me, it's less of a waste to buy the best quality available and enjoy it, than to borrow a lower quality and 10% of the time end up buying the BD anyway.

it's not like buying a BD means you spent 30bux on it. the only movies I've spent that much on were gifts for other ppl(it's a little tacky giving somebody a 2yr old movie that cost your 2.99, haha)

the past winter I purchased several boxsets off amazon. harry potter, aliens, die hard, planet of the apes for under 100bux total. 21 movies at less than 5bux a pop... the stuff I find locally in clearance bins can often be even cheaper.

I would definitely rent more, if it was actually cheaper than me buying the movie for 5bux

+1

Also, as you mentioned earlier, buying movies becomes more reasonable when you are effectively splitting the cost with friends and family.  Sure, for some gotta have titles, we might all buy our own copies.  But, in many cases, if one of my brothers or my parents buy a movie then I don't and vice versa.  We see each other often enough that it is no big deal to swap movies back and forth.  That's how I saw Pacific Rim 3D, World War Z 3D, Man of Steel 3D, and Monster's University 3D; my brother/parents bought them and I borrowed them or watched them at their house.  Conversely, I've bought a number of movies and invited them over to watch movies or loaned them to them.

When you split the cost 5 ways then even a $30 Blu-Ray purchase works out to be cheap at $6 per person.  Even if you only watch it once, that isn't bad.  And if you like it enough to watch multiple times, those extra viewings are free.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Craig Peer 
...I can't watch anything other than top quality HD at this point. The artifacts hurt my brain !

There's so little time.  With DVR'ed HD content, Netflix, Amazon, and three RedBoxes (Blu Ray rental) within 5 minutes of my home, I just don't want to spend time watching that's not at least 720p.  The matter is amplified by having a BenQ W1080ST and a 150" screen.

Some day soon, I'll compare a DVD copy of something I own to its Blu Ray counterpart to better quantify my disdain for low-def..

Went out today and picked up Dances With Wolves for $8, Jurassic Park for $15 and Gladiator for $16. Gotta love WalMart.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobthermal 
 

2-head VHS VCR (Emerson) connected to TV (set to ch. 3) thru RF Modulator.

 

Ahhh glorious Low-Def!

I had purchased a lot of VHS tapes (James Bond collection through License to Kill 1989, a few other memorable ones like Wizard of Oz, Forbidden Planet), but since I purchased a DVD player in July 2002 for the purpose of subscribing to Netflix, I may have watched only one or two of those store-bought tapes since then, and even renting DVDs (and more recently Blu-ray discs) from Netflix rather than watch the old VHS. (I still used a couple 4-head VCRs and lots of VHS tapes for time shifting until Comcast killed the analog channels on October 9, 2012, and within a week I had finished the last of the time-shifted viewing, and haven't played nor recorded a VHS tape since. A HD DVR and a new TV replaced the old time-shifting setup. It took just one day of connecting the HD DVR and new "720p" TV before I was asking myself, "Why didn't I do this years ago?")

Just this morning I was thinking of taking my collection of VHS cassettes (the store-bought recorded tapes and a package of blank tapes, not the time-shifted tapes that I had already erased and tossed), my rewinder, and bulk eraser down to a thrift shop that has VCRs and donating them to the thrift shop; the tapes aren't doing me any good all boxed up and are likely getting worse as they endure each summer and maybe the sales could do the ministry running the thrift shop some good, and maybe someone with a home theater setup like yours could enjoy some good old-fashioned action/adventure/corny puns James Bond movies.