What will come after Blu-ray?

I don't know what's next but as long as you have movies that you can still play and enjoy, it is not a waste of money. BluRay could cease tomorrow but 10 years from now, as long as you still have a player (and you can still get VHS players even today), you will be able to enjoy your movies. I'm not sure what "relevant" format means.

"Passion is just insanity in a cashmere sweater!"

4k "red-ray", no doubt. The thought of going back to "red ray", infrared laser, seems kinda puzzling to me, because DVD used infrared laser, and we went to a blue laser for blu-ray, because a blue laser beam supposedly focuses a tinier beam of light, a tinier beam of light which would be necessary for the finer resolution of 4k I would think. 4k (4,000-line resolution) theoretically displays ALL of the resolution of a 35mm negative or digital cinema distribution format, but on our typically 55" or smaller home screens, unless you sit right up close to the screen, you won't see it anyway, so WTF? Save your money.

As the other poster said, any future format will still play your blu-rays, so don't sweat it, CaliMan.

Blu-ray is IT as far as I'm concerned. The visual quality is more than good enough on anything up to a 70" screen and I'm not replacing hundreds of movies yet again to not even see the difference.

If anything, I'm more interested in projection technology. What will come after LED, LCD, Plasma and DLP?

Whatever comes next will not be a disc it will be streamed. Netflix has shown that is what people want. Blu Ray is the last take home format. It's like asking what came after CD's, it was MP3's not some better higher fidelity format. People want to stream or download not build more shelving for their entertainment. They aren't even working on a new storage format for mass consumption, everyone in the industry knows it will be all online.

I guess I'm in the minority because I actually prefer having a physical collection of movies on display. I like it. I have all my movies alphabetized. I don't want my collection to be on the cloud or on a thumb drive. But oh well can't change technology

Well they've already announced 4K Blu-Rays for next year. So that would be what comes after.

Porch Monkey 4 Life.

Any news on 4K players for these discs? Seems that this format could die quickly like HD-DVD if people don't rush to replace their hardware, as was the case with HD-DVD.

There will always be a market for hard-disc collectors, as yet another viewing option, besides and in addition to downloads.

I too like to buy a movie on hard disc once (assuming there isn't some later version with more special features) and then play it anytime I want without having to pay a subscription service fee. Plus I like looking at the case cover art, liner notes, and enjoying special features from the disc's main menu.

But there's also a place for people who want to click a mouse and have the movie appear and play too. If there's one thing about a lot of Americans, perhaps a lot of the world, they want it simple and cheap, and simple and cheap always takes a back-seat to quality in such people. This is why inferior-quality VHS won out over superior-quality Betamax!

As far as 4K players, I won't be rushing out and buying one, as I don't see the need for 4K. Blu-ray looks just fine to these tired old eyes. Blu-ray is IT for me! In such time as all blu-ray players are replaced by 4K players and I'm FORCED to buy a 4K player because blu-ray players are no longer manufactured, blu-rays will play just fine in them, with upscaling to boot, just like DVDs play just fine and are upscaled to boot in blu-ray players. But I'm not replacing my entire library of blu-ray movies with 4K discs. No thanks. No more. You younger kids can spend your hard-earned money on this stuff. Yes, it's grand, it's spectacular, it's visually gorgeous, but in the end, it's just entertainment, for God's sake!

Hard disc? Do you mean optical disc? The only movies distributed on HDD are only available to movie theaters for commercial use AFAIK. Typically spelling disk with a "c" indicates an optical medium.

I agree that there are advantages to having "hard copy", but strongly caution against anyone believing that they'll really be able to "buy once" by buying Blu-ray. DVD video discs use the Content Scrambling System (CSS), which fortunately has been cracked and published world-wide. (Note that's still a crime in the US!) Thanks to the computer industry's support of DVD, you will be able to rip your DVD, and store it for future viewing long after the last DVD-compatible player has died.

With Blu-ray it's a different story. The DRM is far more sophisticated, proprietary and secret. Companies like Sony are working hard to make sure that you can't use their Blu-ray releases, except under their very selfish and increasingly restrictive terms. Compatibility issues are not uncommon, and bound to increase. And since most Blu-ray players only have HDMI outputs, with their own proprietary encryption methods, the fact is that Blu-ray viewing is a house of cards that's way too easy to collapse.

One day soon, Sony and/or its other big business counterparts could decide to make Blu-ray obsolete by force. I wouldn't be surprised if the encryption algorithms don't already have a "drop dead" date programmed into them. When that day comes, your Blu-ray collection may still be a collector's item, but the content of discs will be unplayable.

There are precedents in the DRMed music distribution industry. Companies have gone out of business (or gotten out of the business), and when their decryption keys disappeared from the Internet, so did the ability to play the DRMed content. On the Blu-ray side there have been compatibility issues with new Blu-ray releases having DRM schemes that early Blu-ray players don't have decryption software for. You can keep on buying new Blu-ray players, but because there's no law requiring new players to support every last encryption scheme, both old and new, you may need to maintain a rather large collection of players of several vintages and the necessary HDMI hardware with its own set of keys that must match the various players. That's a big commitment to make to a product that you'll never truly own!

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/wal-mart-closes-down-drm-operat ions-makes-music-unplayable-20080929
https://www.eff.org/pages/customer-always-wrong-users-guide-drm-online -music
https://www.eff.org/issues/drm
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/update-x2-avatar-blu-ray-drm-bites- legitimate-customers/8193
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/new-blu-ray-discs-with-bd-drm-f ailing-to-play-on-some-devices/

The notion that having it in your hands gives you complete control is out of date. Sad but very true.

As for the "superior-quality Betamax" myth, The theoretical maximum horizontal resolution for original Betamax was only 10 lines more than original VHS, a paltry 4% difference that would be mighty hard for the best eyes to detect! Compare that to the whopping 32% difference from broadcast quality at ~330 lines!

Remember that's only at the fastest tape speeds. To be able to store a 2 hour movie on Betamax, users had to either split it among 2 cassettes (which was a losing proposition for video rental stores) or select a slower tape speed, and at that speed Betamax video quality was clearly inferior to VHS, which thanks to the larger cassette could record 2 hours at full quality. Also note that while VHS equipment makers refined their product to give specs equal to or better than Betamax, but Sony never produced a larger Betamax cassette to allow recording feature films at best quality.

Sometimes qualities other than specsmanship are the ones that really matter.

As for 4K, as a producer of video content, I will be buying 4K (or maybe 8K) gear sooner or later to keep pace with the industry. However as a consumer of video content I'm in no hurry to upgrade. Since most of what I watch is still produced for 1080i (some still for 720p!), there's no point in doing so any time soon. I'm also wary of the use of extremely lossy compression that's used for retail distribution of 4K content. To me it looks a lot like robbing Peter to pay Paul!