As reported by FlatpanelsHD.com, it looks like LG is pulling out of the Blu-ray player market. Searching LG’s website will bring up individual pages for Blu-ray players, such as the UBK80 and BP350, but every selection is listed as “Discontinued.” In addition, the Blu-ray/DVD player landing page now gets redirected to the 4K TV landing page.
Look, I’m not hear to deny that Blu-rays and DVDs have been on the decline for years. Best Buy’s decision to stop offering the physical discs, both in-store and online, at the beginning of the year was a strong indication of that fact. Other retailers didn’t follow suit, though, which says more about Best Buy’s disc strategy than the overall market. It’s still exceedingly easy to find and purchase Blu-ray discs through the world’s largest retailer, Amazon. As evidenced by Blu-ray.com, most movies still get released on UHD 4K Blu-ray. Even if BD player sales have slowed, there continues to be new and re-released content available.
When content new and old is readily available through different streaming services, many ask the question as to why anyone would want to own a Blu-ray disc anyway. Basically it comes down to streaming bandwidth. No matter what, the video being streamed to your TV is compressed. It can lead to artifacts such as color banding or a diminished dynamic range. It’s also not possible to get lossless spatial audio (be it Dolby Atmos or DTS) from a stream. Some services are better than others (with Apple TV+ offering the best bitrate of the pack), but almost all of them pale in comparison to Blu-ray. Sony Pictures Core is a lossless streaming option — but requires you to have a Sony product — and there’s Kaleidescape, which offers content with reference-level video and lossless spatial audio as downloads that stand side-by-side with Blu-ray discs in quality if you use its products.
Some online reaction has linked the news of LG stopping BD player production with the impending demise of Blu-ray itself, citing it as the end of an era. But when it comes down to it, LG wasn’t producing the most popular or highest-end players out there, so if the company is doing anything, it’s cutting losses on products it wasn’t actively developing anyway. The last LG BD player update came in 2018, and while the same can be said for Sony and Panasonic, both of those companies have been at the top of best Blu-ray player lists for years.
Plus, both Sony and Panasonic are still offering high-quality players. At $1,000, the Buy at Amazon has been one of the best players out there since Oppo left the universal disc player market in 2018, causing the beloved Oppo UDP-203 and UDP-205 to rocket in price on the used market. Used by reviewers and enthusiasts alike (yours truly included), the beloved Oppo UDP-203‘s prices skyrocketed leaving the more-than-capable Panasonic to fill the void.
More recently, Magnetar entered the North American market, offering, as Caleb Denison put it, the “unnecessary and universally awesome” UDP900. It’s certainly not for everyone, but alongside the Sony and Panasonic players, the Magnetar offers evidence that interest in watching movies at their highest quality at home is still a viable option. While we might have lost another handful of players, Blu-ray still lives to fight another day.
This post has been corrected to state that Kaleidescape offers downloads and is not a streaming service.
