The entire home entertainment industry is feeling Blu.

That’s because Sony’s Blu Ray emerged victorious from a format war with rival HD DVD and has become the next-generation heir to DVD.

The future of home entertainment, however, comes at a price.

“Right now, the cheapest Blu Ray player is $400, but they can go up to $1,000,” Canton Circuit City sales representative Zach McKinney said.

McKinney considers Sony’s PlayStation 3 the best Blu Ray player on the market because of its speed.

“The PlayStation 3 loads the Blu Rays a lot faster because it has a bigger hard drive,” he said.

PlayStation 3 costs about $400.

Blu Ray disks cost more than standard DVDs. Blu Ray disk prices for new releases can range from $25 to $35.

Most Blu Rays are capable of delivering a full 1080 P high-definition picture. Regular DVDs can be converted to 1080 P using an up-convert DVD player.

A Blu Ray player also will convert standard DVDs to 1080 P, but McKinney said not all 1080 P pictures are created equal.

“The picture on an up-converted DVD will be a little bit more fuzzy, and the colors aren’t going to be as bright or as rich as the Blu Ray,” he said. “The Blu Ray itself is going to have an all-around better picture.”

Having the proper setup also is important to getting the most out of Blu Ray. A high-definition television or monitor with a high-definition multimedia interface port is a must. McKinney recommends getting the set with the best refresh rate.

“The better the refresh rate, the sharper the picture will be,” he said.

When it comes to hooking up a Blu Ray, McKinney recommends using an HDMI cable.

“Honestly, an HDMI cable is the only way I would hook up a Blu Ray player. It’s the only way to get a full 1080 P high-definition picture.”

Although Blu Ray appears to be the next big thing, McKinney said it doesn’t seem to have permeated the mainstream consciousness yet.

“We actually get a lot of people that come in who still don’t know what Blu Ray is,” McKinney said.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

You won’t notice much of a difference on the surface, but Blu Ray works much differently than standard DVD. The internal laser that reads the discs in a Blu Ray is blue. Hence the name of the product. Standard DVD uses a red laser.

Because of new lens specifications, the Blu Ray beam is smaller and allows recording to be done on smaller areas of the disc. The data on a Blu Ray also are located much closer to the surface of the disc. This allows the data to be read at a shorter distance and results in less distortion. Blu Rays have a hard, scratch-resistant coating on the surface of the discs to protect close-to-the-surface information. Blu Ray players also can be connected to the Internet to download system features and movie bonus features.

Here are six key ways Blu Ray stacks up with the standard DVD

FORMAT WARS

Blu Ray spent the early portion of its life cycle locked in a format war with Toshiba’s HD DVD.

HD DVD hardware was cheaper and was the first to offer the interactive movie-in-movie experience that allowed special features pertaining to a scene to be shown in a pop-up window without leaving the film.

HD DVD had slimmer studio support — Universal, Paramount and Dreamworks were the only studios to support it exclusively. Sony, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lions Gate, MGM and all of their subsidiaries produced disks exclusively for Blu Ray. Warner Bros. produced disks for both formats but produced some high-profile HD DVD exclusives.

Warner Bros. perhaps dealt the final blow to HD DVD when it announced Jan. 4 that it would stop producing HD DVD disks at the end of May. Toshiba promptly canceled a keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics show that was scheduled to take place the same weekend the Warner Bros. news broke. In February, Best Buy, Netflix and Wal Mart announced they would no longer carry HD DVD products. Toshiba officially surrendered soon after those announcements — on Feb. 19.