Blu Ray turns 20

[Wman1996]

SvennoJ said:

Shadow1980 said:

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.

85" is still far too small for 8K to make any sense. You need to be 3.5ft / 1m or closer with 85 degree fov to see 8K on an 85" screen. That would be an 85" PC monitor lol. 8K only makes sense in VR.

For an 85" 4K TV you need a viewing angle of 43 degrees to see the benefit, at 8 ft. Only if you sit closer than 5 ft you get some benefit from higher than 4K.

So unless VR movies catch on for 8K per eye headsets, 8K disc format is pointless. However bigger discs can also fit entire seasons instead of 62 discs lol



Just googled the largest disc set, it's only $140, $2.25 per disc, bargain!
https://gruv.com/products/murder-she-wrote-the-complete-series-blu-ray-_av13032125


Sony could use 4K blu-ray or BDXL for storage next gen. One quad layer disc can hold up to 128GB, but perhaps it's cheaper just to press multiple single layer discs. GT7 came on 2 blu-rays (while the game has grown further to 130GB-150GB now)

It could also be that game installs will shrink with more data getting streamed from the server like FS2024.

One of the biggest missed opportunities of Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray is mass storage of SD (and even HD for UHD) video. There exist in some regions huge amounts of TV episodes on a couple of discs, but it's not very commercially viable compared to digital distribution in streaming and purchases. 

There are German Blu-rays of TMNT (1987 series) for the first 7 seasons. Three separate releases with tons of episodes on a disc, in SD. Sadly, they skipped the last 3 seasons AKA "The Red Sky Era".