Samsung Exits the Blu-ray Player Market

First Oppo, and now it’s Samsung. Both have pulled out of 4K player manufacture! The trend looks to be quite obvious, in that streaming is starting to impact disc sales, despite movie houses being quite optimistic about present HD and 4K Blu-ray disc sales. Clearly the ultimate writing is “on the wall” and Blu-ray discs are slated to follow in the footsteps of vinyl. I just hope not in my lifetime; if so, quality has finally hit an all time low and the mediocrity has won out.

Samsung Electronics has confirmed to Forbes that they are to stop manufacturing both HD and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players for at least the USA market. I assume that this was the reason for Samsung showing no new models at CES 2019 last month and at TFA in Berlin last August. No reasons have yet been given for their decision. With Panasonic, Pioneer and Sony now releasing high end audiophile players I can only assume that Samsung didn’t want to play in that market.

Has convenience finally trumped quality as ISP bandwidths to the home rise? Even if sufficient bandwidth exists, no Internet movie streaming companies are close to putting out the bit rates that come off a 4K UHD disc! With typical maximum ISP streaming rates of 25Mb/s they aren’t even getting close to the peak bit rates of 70Mb/s from a 4K Blu-ray disc.

Yes, and some of you out there want 8K images. How do you think they will look at 25Mb/s? The current ATSC 1.0 OTA HDTV streams at 19.3Mb/s and even ATSC 3.0 can only support a peak bit rate of 57Mb/s. Todays (and tomorrows) compression techniques just aren’t good enough to squeeze a quart into a pint pot, and maintain 8K resolution down a 25Mb/s pipe.

70Mb/s from your web movie company; you must be joking, and that is only for 4K!

The Ultra HD Blu-ray shinny plastic disc is still your highest image resolution source and will remain so for many years to come.