You’re never going to see me complaining about more people getting into 4K Blu-ray collecting. I’ve been in this hobby for years now, and I’ve amassed a vast collection of discs. I don’t have any regrets about this, but I did learn pretty quickly that I was going to need a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player. I wanted to take advantage of Dolby Vision, and that meant my Xbox wouldn’t cut it anymore.
The problem is that many of the 4K players you see on the market aren’t exactly new. In fact, most of them are pretty old. I have a Sony UBP-X700M, a player that was released back in 2018. Sony has refreshed this specific model over the years, with the most recent one coming in 2025. However, that refresh was actually just dropping the online connectivity, so it has the same hardware as it had eight years ago. That’s not actually the end of the world because my player still plays discs, and it’s not like I need to update it for new features. It either plays discs or it doesn’t. However, many players have problems with 100 GB triple-layer discs, and that could prove to be an issue for people getting into the hobby.
4K Blu-ray players and the 100 GB problem
Some players have issues that need to be fixed
My 4K Blu-ray player is plagued with the problem that haunts many 4K collectors. Sometimes, my player has trouble transitioning to the final layer on a 100 GB 4K Blu-ray disc. It’s not every disc, but it’s enough of them to the point where I’m ready to call it a problem that looms over every triple-layer disc I put into the player. There’s nothing I can do myself to make them always work. There’s not a firmware update that’ll fix the issue, and it doesn’t matter if my disc is scratched or not. A pristine disc will still have playback issues, and it’s very annoying.
You might think you can just go out and buy a new Blu-ray player, but that’s not the case. Yes, you might not have issues with another one, but the reality is that this problem can happen to any player. It seems that, based on online discussions, a Panasonic player might be your best bet to avoid the triple-layer problems, but they’re not immune either. Many people use an Xbox or PlayStation as their 4K player, and the freezing and stuttering can happen there as well.
Essentially, no player is safe, and this could be something that stops the 4K Blu-ray renaissance dead in its tracks. It feels like we need somebody to step up and make a player that solves this problem, but there’s nobody on the horizon that appears interested in doing that. This means the current problems that are running rampant in all of the current 4K players are here to stay. You might be one of the lucky ones who avoids the issues entirely, or you’ll be like me and start sweating every time you open up your Oppenheimer 4K and get to the scene where the bomb is about to go off.
People who have been around the 4K Blu-ray block for a while know all about these issues, but people getting into the hobby for the first time don’t. I would hate for somebody’s first experience with a disc to be something that freezes, which is why these problems need to get fixed. The only issue is that I don’t see anybody stepping up to do it.
We need new 4K Blu-ray players, but we aren’t getting them
We’re actually getting fewer of them
While it might feel like physical media is on an upward trajectory, it doesn’t seem that corporations feel that way. We’ve been more or less stuck with the same Blu-ray players on the market for years now, and with Sony exiting the disc production market on PlayStation, it sounds like we’ll be losing another player once the PlayStation 6 launches. If Microsoft follows suit with the next Xbox, that’s another common 4K Blu-ray player that’ll bite the dust.
New players don’t seem like they’re on the horizon, and it means these problems that we have are problems that are here to stay. It wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t so widespread, and I feel like it’s one of those things that are being brushed under the rug for some reason. It’s so strange to see so many people struggle with triple-layer discs only to have nothing done about it. I don’t see how this would fly in any other industry, but in the world of 4K Blu-ray, it feels like it’s just one of those quirks that you have to deal with.
