A few days ago, it was revealed to Japan's "Mainichi Asamun" that Sony would lay off 250 employees in the department that produces recordable media discs. After the news came out, everyone panicked. As a pioneer in CD and Blu-ray technology, Sony's strategic adjustment has always been regarded as the vane of the industry.
Precursors of disappearance?
In fact, there have been a lot of similar discontinuations in previous years. For example, in 2008, Toshiba stopped producing HD DVD burning discs for games; In 2021, the only production line in Chinese mainland that produces genuine Blu-ray, Shanghai Xinsuo Blu-ray Pressing Line, announced the suspension of production; In 2023, Panasonic announced that it would stop producing Blu-ray discs for burning.
Thankfully, Sony has only stopped producing consumer-grade BD-R, which will not affect Blu-ray discs for games, TV shows, and movies, and will continue to be produced and sold as standard Blu-rays, 4K UHD discs, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox Blu-ray discs.
Blu-ray discs won't disappear immediately, let's take a look at a set of data: Sony sold 86 million PlayStation physical Blu-ray game discs in FY23, and the number is still huge. In the era of booming digital downloads, physical gamers still prefer Blu-ray discs because of its far superior graphics and sound experience over digital games.
But the question is, how long can this traditional disc last? More and more users choose to watch movies and listen to music on the Internet, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, Aiteng Youmang and other platforms provide more convenient choices, rich resources, and relatively low purchase costs (but there are also leek-cutting behaviors, such as a platform ordinary subscription can only get 4K, HDR10+, 5.1 channels, upgrade a premium subscription to get Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos).
Is the Blu-ray disc advantage still there?
Actually, Blu-ray discs are not completely without advantages either. For some audiophiles, there is no substitute for the sound and picture quality provided by physical discs. It can provide a stable high-quality playback experience regardless of network speed, and there are many uncut versions and behind-the-scenes footage of the physical disc, which is also a meaningful thing to collect personally.
Some foreign netizens used Netflix to compare one of his Tibetan films "Blade Runner 2049". His collection of 4K UHD Blu-ray discs can enjoy up to 100Mbps video bitrate and lossless Dolby Atmos audio format. Especially in the action scenes, the extremely clear picture and the shocking sound effect have a cinema-level look. And Netflix's "Blade Runner 2049" 4K version, the video bitrate is only 15-25Mbps, the audio uses Dolby Digital+ format, although the viewing experience is also good, but in terms of detail, color depth and sound performance, there is still a certain gap compared with Blu-ray discs.
The best viewing scheme for gradual degradation
It is undeniable that Blu-ray discs are still the best solution for watching HD movies and playing HD games. Layoffs in Sony's divisions that produce recordable media discs are a historical trend, but we don't have to worry too much about the future of Blu-ray discs. In addition to optical discs, modern storage media also include hard disks, and we can also choose a player that supports hard disk reading. For example, Jacco G5600 and G5800 4K UHD Blu-ray players, you can still experience the high-definition pleasure by downloading the 4K movies you want to watch on the hard disk.
Sound Fan Si, 4K World, Cuckoo TV, MINI4K Fan Movie ...... It is a website recommended by audio-visual lovers for high-definition film and television resources. Blu-ray discs may be out of the ordinary, but Blu-ray movies won't at least!
(The picture comes from the Internet)