I have read reviews for years about how DVD/Blu Ray players produce better quality picture than others. I wanted to know why this would be, and if optical drives experience the same thing? Also, do the connections you make matter between HDMI, Firewire or USB? Your time would be apreciated.
I have read reviews for years about how DVD/Blu Ray players produce better quality picture than others.
What would "others" be in this context? Can you give an example of such claim?
In regards to connection interfaces, there is no practical difference between USB and Firewire; unlike them HDMI isn't used as a general purpose interface, it's used to connect devices with digital video/audio output directly to something that plays back said video/audio (i.e., an HDTV set).
By "others", I mean other DVD/Blu Ray players, as in, one DVD player produces a better picture than another DVD player. (Same thing can be applied to Blu Ray players.)
Those should all be taken with a grain of salt. Visual quality may differ due to upscaling or post-processing chips/algorithms used, but the actual video transfer quality, compression quality, and your output device (the TV) matter a lot more than any of that. Which means, you should either test the devices you've chosen on the same TV/monitor and see if you can quickly spot the difference before you make the purchase, or think about maximizing quality by other means first: getting discs produced by respected transfer studios, getting a better TV, etc..