I wish DVD was Blu-ray

[roxics]

For a lot of people standard definition is good enough, but I feel like 1080p HD is really the sweet spot.

I sometimes wish I could go back to 1994-95 and drop blu-ray technology on the desk of engineers at Sony, Toshiba, Philips and Panasonic so that we would have gotten Blu-ray instead of DVD back in 1997/98. Maybe throw a little HDR in there.

I just finished mastering another DVD for my boss because he wants a disc that is most compatible and the reality is, DVD is the most compatible, even today. Blu-ray never had the traction DVD had.

I've seen cereal boxes that had DVDs attached to them.
I've seen Apple computers that have superdrives (DVD burners) in them, but Apple never embraced blu-ray hardware/software.
Even today many lower budget laptops have DVD burners in them but not blu-ray burners. Some have blu-ray.
You can buy set top DVD recorders, or at least you used to. I've never seen a set top blu-ray recorder.
BD-Rs continue to be fairly expensive compared to DVD-R because they were never as popular.

Blu-ray has gotten more popular over time but never to the point of DVD. It also sadly came up against Youtube/Netflix not long after it was introduced to the market.

I know it's pointless, but I just kind wish we had gotten Blu-ray instead of DVD in 1997/98. I know TV tech at the time wouldn't have been able to display it to the full extent, but that's ok, it would have been future proof for future TVs.

Of course this means blu-ray would have had to have had better 4:3 support. But I would have been ok with 1920x1440, even if it meant widescreen films in 16:9 would have only used a 1920x1080 crop of the 4:3 frame. We wouldn't have lost anything compared to the 1080p Blu-ray we have. But we would have gained a nice 4:3 resolution and possibly an anamorphic 16:9 1440p mode.

Maybe we would have even gotten some 4:3 HD transfers of films that were shot flat 4-perf the way we did on some VHS transfers.

Just thinking out loud.