So patents last 15-20 years... regular Blu-ray patent has already expired I guess, but Ultra HD Blu-ray is the current patent, releasing in 2015... so another 6 to 11 years before consumers can do whatever they want with the technology.
Would be outdated by then by the next new thing though.
That is if there is still an optical drive market in the future.
Sony never made a big deal of how the PS5 can play Ultra HD disks the way they did with DVD and Blu-ray. Ultra HD sales seem a lot smaller than previous renditions. You also have a lot of content being kept behind the streaming paywall rather than getting released.
I don't think there will be a large enough market to support 8K, backed up by the fact that a specification has been written but no one wants to go forward with making the disks and drives.
The number refers to the horizontal resolution. FHD is nearly 2K pixels wide, just as 4K resolutions are nearly 4K pixels wide, although FHD is the typical term for the resolution and QHD is more commonly called 2K instead than FHD
Okay, but, 4k has literally 4 times the number of pixels that 1080P does, 3840 horizontal("4k"?) versus 1920("2k"?), and 2160 versus 1080 vertical. We are not so far from breaking the "1000pixels" interpretation completely; "13k" would be 12,480 pixels wide.
Seems to me that marketers are trying to conflate "k" and Megapixels, but if we started using Megapixels for Displays, the side-by-side numbers would look truely pathetic(versus what "seems common/attainable", not what's "percievable".
I mean, I agree its already broken, but proponents of this "it's x thousand pixels wide!" non-sense will point out that at least it rounds up to that number, so I opted to point of the vaule at whict that excuse, too, breaks down. 4k has 4 times(2x2) the pixels as 1080P, and 8k has, well shit, 16 times(4x4) the pixels as 1080P. Someone shit the bed with this non-sense.
Apparently the "official" standard defines nothing beyond 8k. Go figure.
fortunately, this change does not affect Bluray movies you can buy at the store. This is only about recordable Bluray drives, which basically no one uses on a consumer level.
i think that's it. We used to use CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to record playlists and movies, respectively. Data hoarders today will prefer multi-hard drive servers over burning everything to Bluray, and for one-time file transfers, we have flash drives and online file shares. I just can't think of a use case for BR-R that isn't better served by a different technology.
Presumably when we're talking off-site backups we're talking about a separate company sitting somewhere in an abandoned nuclear bunker which can justify the price of a tape drive or twenty.
When the tape drive fails and eats your tape in the process, you better hope you have a second backup or you'll be crying salty salty tears.
I worked in the service center for a tape-drive manufacturer and I would routinely see the drives we got back for repair. They were often taken apart by the customer in a frantic and desperate attempt to get their cassette out. The cassette was almost always still in there though, with multiple feet of tape snagged and wound around everything.
