This year I have been slowly building up a Blu-ray film collection to add to my Star Trek collection. I see this as a once in a generation chance to buy movies in high definition at rock bottom prices. I don’t find I need to stream.
The only challenge with physical media is storage. Though my solution is to ditch the plastic cases and put them into these wallets including the cover art. I’m not keen on buying digital movies online as they could go bust or sometimes they remove bought movies.
The advantage of Blu-ray is you aren’t dependent on an internet connection with good bandwidth. You get special features and the actual quality (usually bitrate) is better than streaming. A typical Blu-ray disc is 25gb to 100gb in size. Streaming is like 1gb to 10gb.
4K Blu-ray (black cases) is Ultra High Definition and very high quality. Streaming 4K requires a 25mbit connection as a minimum and will likely always be the premium option. Some of my Star Trek films are in 4K blu ray. I store my Blu-rays in baskets like my Star Trek collection:
Like many people I don’t go to the cinema anymore. I would probably go with someone on the one-off but don’t know anyone interested. It makes sense to me to invest in a Blu-rays while their still being sold. I imagine CEX will go bust one day and there will only be eBay.
I’m sure they will one day stop manufacturing the Blu-ray players unless it makes a come back like vinyl. Though given Blu-ray players were built into multiple generations of Playstation’s and Xbox’s I doubt it will be hard to procure one 2nd hand.
I’m 38 years old so I’m pretty sure my Blu-ray collection will last my lifetime. They’ll only be obsolete to me if we lived in some Star Trek like socialist utopia where the internet was free and we could stream anything we wanted for free. At the moment that doesn’t look likely.
I have blogged about organising my Star Trek media collection before. You can read about it here.