John Milla,

Thanks for your feedback John, appreciated. Do you have the same issue with a lot of the older arcade games?

I've yet to buy a 4K monitor. Been holding off for two reasons; my eye sight is deteriorating, so I 'm unsure if the increased clarity will benefit me; plus of course the expense. I've been saving up for a VR head set, which I want before a better monitor. Friends have recommended the 4K, but I can wait a little longer. :) Besides I'll need a new set of graphic cards first as well. I'm running two Nvidia GTX 980 Ti's at the moment, which are fine for what I play now, but I'll be needing to upgrade them sometime soon so that I can benefit from the latest improvements in graphics. I look forward to it eventually. :)

Whiterabbit-uk, RE: 4K, FWIW as always...

Need a Big screen to really notice the difference increased pixel density brings. While some people say they can appreciate the increased pixel density on a high end phone, I think most people won't *start* to notice until 32", and won't fully see the difference until they get into the 40" range.

That said, Windows is pretty much agnostic when it comes to FHD vs. 2K vs. 4K. You up the text display etc. to 125, 150 or more, and everything looks the same -- with our mini-PC hooked up to our 4K TV, I set the rez in Windows at FHD, & it looks the same without having to change the text size and suffer whatever problems from incompatible apps. FHD Blu-ray [I can't afford 4K Blu-ray] does benefit from the higher pixel density -- it looks gorgeous [a slight bit better than 4K streaming]. But you can't really tell the difference compared to the same Blu-ray on this PC with a 27" FHD monitor.

For gaming 4K is worth it *when/if* using titles designed for 4K, providing you've got a large enough screen, but as you've said, that means a new graphics card, and with today's Horrible market, Good Luck. OTOH you'll likely just need one. *Maybe* NVIDIA's hash limiting will return some sanity to the market in the future, but that future's not here yet.

mike,

Hi Mike,

I've tried a 32 inch monitor and hated it. I found it gave me eye strain; especially at the distance the monitor is on my corner desk. I prefer a 24 to 25'' multi monitor set up. But I've yet to try 27''. A friend recently purchased a 27'' and said it was okay for gaming. I'm sure I'll end up buying one eventually, even if I keep the left and right monitors at 25''.

I've invested thousands into Blu Ray over the years since it was released. Thankfully I only ever purchased one HD-DVD and that was by mistake (Gladiator). Whether I'll go for 4K disks we shall see in the not too distant future. (assuming I win my legal case, which will be a cause for celebration 'eventually'). To be honest, although there is more clarity with Blu Ray compared to DVD, with the upscaling feature I have on my Blu Ray player, sometimes I cannot see the difference when I've compared DVD versions of my collection with the Blu Ray replacements I've purchased later; eg The Lord of the Rings Trilogy; though the Blu Ray versions include quite a lot of extra cut scenes from the original release. Same with The Hobbit movies.(I bought DVD versions to take on vacation as our laptops don't support Blu Ray. I do have an external Blu Ray player, but could never get it to work with either of our lap tops, though I've not tried it with my daughters gaming laptop (she won't let me near it despite buying it for her, lol. I'm considering just ripping them next time as I have a few of those pocket sized externals that hold 4TB. I should easily get enough movies on one of those to keep our late evenings supplied with movies to watch. I usually take around 50 DVD's for a two week vacation, to ensure we have plenty of choice.

The price of NVidia cards has gone through the roof since the Covid pandemic. I won't pay such prices. Generally I'll pick up a second hand last generation model via eBay with some insurance as you can pick them up for less than half the price of a new one. So far I've been really lucky and have so far always got decent cards. The last ones I purchased (2 x GTX 980Ti's I got for almost 60% off the market price.

Whiterabbit-uk, a 27" monitor is the largest I can handle, and even then I prefer to have whatever in a window rather than full screen, so yeah, I can understand you not liking a 32". I Like to look straight ahead, not swiveling side to side.

The last Blu-ray player we got was several years back -- a mid-high range Sony -- and as they kept upping the DRM on new discs, we started getting glitches during playback. So I got a USB Blu-ray writable drive -- it's a laptop drive in an external housing -- along with the mini-PC running PowerDVD Ultra. That was an improvement, but still not perfect. Then I started copying the movies -- copy the entire disc & then use tsmuxer to copy just the movie & get rid of the HD sound track [5.1's enough for us], putting them on a fast USB stick, and it worked Perfect. Keeping the Blu-ray format they'll work with a Blu-ray player [hard or software], while the .m2ts file works great with players like VLC for Android. And the subs work everywhere too.

BTW, it doesn't take much horsepower to play Blu-ray video -- even my wife's oldest, low end Kindle HD does great. So rather than lugging around a laptop, a tablet might be the way to go (?). Amazon's Prime Day is coming up, and their new Kindle HD 10 should be around 1/2 price.

RE: DVDs... The quality of upscaling depends on the TV. While our 4K TV does great upscaling 1080p, DVDs, or anything the old broadcast rez, looks so bad it's unwatchable.

Hope your luck continues when it comes to a graphics card or cards. My son & I are in the same boat, me with a RX 470, him with a 480... it's past time to replace those cards, but to get any meaningful increase in performance we're talking over 5X what we paid for those cards!

mike,

Thanks for the suggestions Mike re: copying my Blu Rays.

I bought a kindle for my wife several years ago; she hated it so we gave it to her mother who used to take loads of books away on vacation (they are retired and usually (pre pandemic) would go away all winter, so the kindle was a god send for her as it saved a lot of suitcase space.

A friend recently gave me the complete collection of Michael Moorcock Sci Fantasy stories and I'm keen to re read them. (I read most of them when I was a teenager back in the 1970's), and either lent out and never got back, or gave them away many years ago, So I'm thinking of getting a kindle for myself at some point so that I can read them. I still have several Terry Brooks books to read yet; (catching up on the Shannara chronicles; I read the original first in the series 'Sword of Shannara' way back in the 70's when it was first released, but never followed through with his sequels and prequels until a few years ago. I'm almost at the end of the whole series now and looking forwards to re reading Moorcock's eternal champion stories. :)

Hi, Stephen!
You should read "The end of Blu-ray: Thanks to the rise of streaming, Samsung is discontinuing its Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray player lines", an article on ZDNet dot com...
Notice that, more and more, the Blu-Ray version of a movie costs about the same as the DVD one (because if it costs much more, sales drop), so having DVD-only versions is common.
As you and Mike said, physical media will still have a place, but it seems most people aren't willing to pay anything more than DVD prices for it (4K doesn't seem to be doing so well either), since the 'visual difference' isn't that great on most 'watching screens', and DVD players and recorders are cheap and plentiful.
As for books and Kindles, I agree with most comments, but the sheer space occupied by them is a growing problem, as homes (specially flats) keep getting smaller: I have to find some institution in Brazil which would want most of my SF collection, for that reason.
Thanks as always for your work here, and good luck with that contractor!

Whiterabbit-uk, There are 2 kinds of Kindles... there's the original type, designed solely as a reader, and they've gone quite far developing the special low power display etc. Then they've got the Kindle HD, which is the Amazon version of the everyday Android tablet. You can still read Kindle books with it, but the display of print is not as nice as Kindles designed just for reading -- I don't think any Android tablet can match it. To me the advantages of the Kindle HD vs. say a Samsung tablet are the much lower price and outstanding ruggedness. My wife drops my Samsung tablet and I grimace -- she drops one of her Kindles and I don't even bother to notice. That said, there are Kindle apps for Apple, Android, & Windows [though the Windows app is the unwanted stepchild], so most any sort of tablet would suffice.

alexyu,
I can see the problems with physical media; the same happened to games a decade ago. When I got into gaming game shops used to have shelves full of PC games. Over time console games took over most of that space and stores like Tesco's stopped stocking PC games totally. Already my local store only stocks the DVD/Blu Rays that are in the top sales spots. and local charity shops have also started to remove them from their shelves.

Personally I think its a great shame. I have a couple of thousand DVD and Blu Ray movies (that equate to almost a year of viewing if I watched them 12 hours a day every day for a year I love to dip into them frequently (just watched most of the Alien movies + prequels over the last few days after reinstalling my Alien games.

I don't mind streaming movies, but you have to pay for it and I'd rather buy the disk and then watch it without having to pay again. I know subscriptions are low, but it still mounts up over time; especially if you have more than one service.

I've already got rid of a lot of my books. I keep all my encyclopaedias and dictionaries (I used to collect them) as well as non fiction books (though many are defunct since the advent of the internet, but I have no space for more. My study has two large almost ceiling height shelf units that are double stacked with Blu Ray and DVD's with several large boxes stored in the attic. The lounge has a smaller shelf unit full of books and there are two Ikea shelf units in the upstairs family room double stacked with books and Vinyl records. Plus several large boxes of books in the attic. I still like the feel of a book in my hand, but I am considering buying a kindle after a friend gave me the entire collection of Michael Moorcock eternal champion books that number at least 50. (can't remember exactly how many there are (it's over 40 years since I read them).

Hi, Stephen!
Even so, DVD/BRs take up less space (and weigh less) than physical books: I also have many (never tried counting them...), trying to have most comics/SF titles; when I started this, streaming wasn't even a thing, but I still prefer the physical disks (and not e-files, because those can be easily damaged, so the main reason to have them -- to have them available when watching is wanted -- wouldn't be met (although discs aren't eternal either; paper books can last a very long time). This is similar to the arguments about keeping data on-premises or 'in the cloud' and, when feasible, I do prefer the former (but for a business I know that's not true).
The main limitation for optic/magnetic records is their need for machines to read them, which eventually break down and, if no longer manufactured (like, say, video disc players), make such a collection useless. Try to watch 3-D Blu-Rays today!
I guess that, for computer games, a mixed soluton may be best: Keep the bulk in the cloud, and have secure copies on-premises, probably on optic discs.

alexyu,

I still have books I purchase din the early 1970's; most are yellowed on the top edges apart from a few limited edition volumes I purchased such as my Lord of the Rings that were printed on acid free paper and seem to have held their colour; also, I never kept those volumes on an open shelf and never exposed to light. Most browning of book edges is caused by slow oxidation of the paper.

Stay safe

Stephen,

Yes, paper quality is a big factor, and most pocketbooks (and older comics) used very cheap paper (though I still have PBs from the '50s which have just some yellowing around the edges; will current DVDs still be readable 70 years later?).

Unfortunately, for digital media, technology changes 'make' them unreadable faster than their physical deterioration: You may have playable cassette tapes, but no tape deck to play them on, so essentially they're lost...

In computer games, there's a whole niche 'reviving' older ones, because even if the games media itself is fine, they can't be played on current tech.

alexyu,

I still have a decent cassette player (including a couple of Sony Walkmans that have been stashed away in the attic and several DVD, DVD RAM and Blu Ray players. So long as they work I always keep them. I did throw away hundreds of cassette based games as well as real floppy disc based games several years ago when we were having work done on the house, then a few weeks after getting rid of them found a piece of peripheral hardware Basically a cassette player that you could hook up to your computer via USB that included an emulator that then enabled you to play those old cassette based games on your computer. with software that would have enabled me to play those games on my PC. It all went into a skip together with some very old computers (386)

As you say technology changes rapidly. I remember getting my first portable tape recorder which was as big as a brick. We used to walk around with it slung around our necks and carrying a small bag of cassettes. Now you can hold literally thousands of songs on a iPod or similar device that would allow you to play music constantly for weeks without hearing the same song.