Blu Ray turns 20

[Shadow1980]

Zippy6 said:

Will we get another low-cost physical format again? Or is this the end of the road?

I somehow doubt it. Diminishing returns means we're unlikely to see any display resolutions higher than 4K become commonplace. While 4K does offer a visible improvement, it's nowhere near as much as the jump from SD to full HD, and 8K is really only useful with really big TVs. Each step up from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to 4K Blu-ray was each a doubling in vertical resolution, but TV size matters in terms of density of lines per vertical inch of screen. Maybe if 85" TVs become the norm I could see 8K catching on in some circles, but in general the average TV size has grown at a slower rate than resolutions have. For anything like 55" or smaller, 1080p is adequate and 4K is about the best you're going to get.

Going from VHS to DVD was huge. In addition to doubling the resolution, the format offered better clarity in general being on an optical disc and everything. I was blown away the first time I saw DVD in action at Walmart's display kiosk for it, and noticed a major improvement on my old 19" Toshiba CRT TV when I got a DVD player of my own. Going from DVD to Blu-ray was a pretty big step as well... if you had a 1080p TV to benefit from it. DVD was fine on the much smaller tube TVs that were still the norm, and if most people were fine with tube TVs and we never moved past that then DVD would probably have never needed to be replaced. But going to bigger screens with higher resolutions meant we arguably needed a new format for home video. Upscaled DVD on HDTV was fine, but there were noticeable artifacts from blowing up an SD image that much (as there is when upscaling anything SD to an HD screen), and a Blu-ray running on an HDTV looked way better.