It’s been 10 years. 10! Since the UHD Blu-Ray format specification and logo was released that is.
I didn’t commit to the format right away. I was still replacing dvds with blu-rays at the time so I wasn’t exactly gagging for having to do it all over again.
But then… It annoyed me to no end that there was this new format and I couldn’t play it. So I got a cheap Samsung 4K UHD player. It was terrible, many discs wouldn’t even play in it and before you knew it Samsung bowed out of the UHD player business.
At the time I had a regular LED TV from Philips, I chose it because it was the last model with SCART, and I still have a lot of devices with SCART to this day. But HDR was barely a thing on it and it broke down, twice. Once audio stopped working and a nice man from Philips turned up, switched some circuit board and presto, sound again. But the second time was way worse, the picture darkened and in a couple of hours all I could do was listen to the TV.
By now I had already invested in a modded Sony UBP-700 that could play all regions of DVD and blu-ray (and UHD is, per the standard, region free at last!) and got a new Dolby Atmos/DTS:X receiver so I could listen to the latest sound formats that came with UHD.
But I got a new TV, I went all out and got an LG OLED C2 77 incher. And it is hands down the best TV I have ever owned.
But then my Sony player stopped playing DVDs. Very annoying. And I splurged for a Magnetar UDP-800, a really expensive player and I have to say there’s really not a whole lot of difference. It’s quieter though, the chassis is sturdy metal so that helps. Magnetar is essentially the players Oppo made before they pulled the plug on their disc playing business.
Anyway. Despite all these changes and being 10 years into the format I still have less than 500 UHD discs. For comparison I have almost 1700 DVDs and nearly 2500 Blu-Rays.
Part of the reason is that it’s still a premium format and comes with premium pricing. You can usually buy the blu-ray release of a movie for 20 bucks less than the 4K and many of the UHD releases still pack in a blu-ray for some reason? And of course, here in Sweden there’s more often than no UHD release at all necessitating importing, and that adds another layer of expense.
I’m rambling, but I needed to get this off my chest I guess. I may continue to yell at clouds in an upcoming post.