I'm suddenly reminded of recent consoles coming out with 500Gb and 1Tb hard drives, and they are 'too small' and only will hold like 4 games at a time...

No.... But the one Sapphire video card was REALLY noisy when certain games were being played, suggesting it was really hot while the rest of the time ran cool, so i tended not to play for too long at a time giving it time to cool down, just in case...

Actually, the Sapphire and ATI Rage 128 were the only 'Hot' cards i ever had...

Because most TVs that are sold right now are 4K. 1080P models are becoming hard to find, and they're often not cheaper because of the lower resolution.

Also, "most people" don't care about specifications (like resolution e.g.) when they buy a TV.

Regret? What's stopping you from getting one if you want one?

At walmart i saw quite a few HD/1080 TV's, they are $100 vs the $380+ 4k versions. Having recently upgraded to HD i don't see the point in 4K for a long time... Just finished a replay of Rebel Galaxy with nearly all features on full and it was fun. I often disable AA to make it easier on the GPU and computer and i didn't notice. HD was more than sufficient.

Also i'd bought at heavy discount 2 Smart TV's that finding plug in a USB drive and just play my anime directly on the TV to be a nice little addition.

Good question. Unless the case doesn't have room for it, DVD readers/writers are on par with CD readers/writers, which is something like $30. Also get a burner and get $20 burnable discs and it's actually not bad storage per cent as a backup method or just making room on your computer until you can afford a large drive.

Also even if there isn't a slot, there's external USB versions, i have a blueray burner that way...

Are they small or large (40"+)?
It's probably old stock that they're trying to clear. I just looked on the Sony* website for North America: no current 1080P models.
(* I just chose Sony as an example, it would surprise me if it would be very different for other manufacturers)

I often watched Blu-Rays on PC :)
Now with 4k I'd need a new drive, but those are already vanishing again.

There are some games with 4k VIdeos, the first one I remember is Tex Murphy Tesla Effect from 2014


DVDs as storage medium already had not an easy start. While in Europe they were quite common, US version ususally were still shipped on multiple CDs instead. At that time I usually ordered US-versions, because they had nicer boxes (EU-versions usually came in a DVD-case), then copied the CDs together to one DVD for easier installing, including some stuff like guides, patches, cracks and trainers.

When games became so big that they could fill a medium like Blu-Ray, download speed was already fast enough, so it became obsolete before it really started.

Now that I think of it ... I even own a Blu-Ray writer and some empty disks, but never used it to create a Blu-Ray.

They looked 40"+.

Although mind you most of these aren't going to be Sony or probably big companies. TCL, LG, Emery, etc. Sony afterall has dropped off most of it's different productions and Playstation being it's primary. Also established technologies will be cheaper to manufacture than newer ones once the larger companies have moved on.

You buy a UHD TV for a couple of reasons. Mainly future proofing. However, the major streaming services (Amazon, Netflix and BBC) all have UHD and HDR content. The other advantage is that the higher end panels tend to have better processors inside them than the cheaper TVs - so the smart applications tend to work better.

Be careful with your terminology. Blu Ray means the original Blu Rays that play at 1080. BD UHD (or 4K) are the newer, UHD ones that are capable of supporting DolbyVision or HDR10. Typically, a normal blu ray beats an HD stream from Netflix or Amazon, but a 4K HDR stream will look slightly better than a blu ray (higher resolution and HDR offset the limited bit rates of the stream). A film natively shot in 4K would look better on the 4K player, although there are open questions over whether its worth purchasing conversions/upscales. That being said, the BD UHD players are struggling to get traction in the market as both the players and the discs are considerably more expensive than standard BluRays. Bear in mind that there's still a vibrant market in DVDs!

Yes. I've had one that was DoA and one that died after four years of use.

Like it's allready been stated. It's not going to happen. Optical media is too slow for games with alot of big textures. It would either lag or textures would be missing and popping in. Sure, you could optimize the games for ram and preload alot. But that's not going to happen either as the dev studios are too lazy for that, especially now with direct storage on the horizon.
I do love me some physical goodies. Unwrappiong the box, taking out the cd and installing the game. Oh my....
But that would also take way too long time with todays games. I for example gave up on GTA5. Stopped the installation and downloaded the online installer instead wich was way faster even with 100Mb/s.
Now I just have an external bluray player/writer just in case. I even have a usb floppy drive ;p

Why? How is USB storage superior, at all? What's so great about USB?

because the thrown away disks end up in turtles killing them in the process :(
so those who are not narcissist arrogant smugs and actually care for the environment stopped using these

when you can not get enough tracktion by creating n number of similar threads, why not necro one of your old ones?

It's not about the protocol, but rather about the means of storage.

Flash memory is solid state, so it avoids many of the issues that optical media has. (Still not as good as cartridges, as the data still has to be copied to RAM before it can be used, but better than waiting for long drive seeks and worrying about the laser going bad.)

A USB attached blu-ray drive would probably run as well (or poorly?) as one attacked via IDE (do such drives exist?) or SATA.