I never fell into the overpriced Blueray scam. The quality of DVDs is just fine. It was blown out of proportion and it costs them no more to make a blueray disk than it does a DVD. It was all just hype to hyper-inflate the price.
And I think you are right... They should have just went to SD card format a longtime ago. The player can be the size of a cigarette pack with no moving mechanical parts to wear out and a whole library of hundreds of movies can be stored in one shoebox.
On a screen as small as 40" (which will do me for a while) there's an obvious improvement in picture quality between BluRay and DVD -- when the effin' BluRay disk will play on the player. The BluRay "standard" is a bucket of vipers.
The problem is, BluRay was inferior to HD-DVD, but BluRay won the format war because of decisions made at a couple of studios.
The coming problem is, 4K TV is starting to arrive, and by the time we're shopping for Christmas 2019, 4K TVs (which are obviously going to be very large screens, otherwise the eye isn't impressed) are going to be below $500-$600 and 8K TV is breathing down everyone's necks. Digital distribution of new release movies to theaters hasn't caught on, which is difficult to understand. Probably has something to do with the Mob activity that governs so much of the entertainment industry machinery.
Optical formats will remain available, of course, probably for some years (the last VHS maker stopped making recording decks a mere two years ago; players are still available, not sure whether they're being made), but solid state digital (both streamed and on media) are going to, quite simply, destroy the market for optical media. A visit to Walmart, with its bins of movies and CDs under $10 (mostly $5 and under) should convince most people.
Most of what I like was 4x3 and looks good on DVD.
Blu Ray never meant much to me.
“And I think you are right... They should have just went to SD card format a longtime ago”
Recordable DVD discs cost a few dimes, a 50gb SD card for HDR content movies cost many dollars. That is what it boiled down to most likely. Also TV manufactures wanted you to buy all new hardware (players). Still yet USB connectors built into TV’s didn’t come around until many years after DVD came out. Just wrong timing.