South Korean giant Samsung did not announce any Blu-ray player at the CEs this year and there is a reason for that. The company while talking to a leading daily said that it is getting out of the Blu-ray player business in the United States. Reports say that Samsung will no longer introduce new Blu-ray players and there are also reports that it will stop making the existing players for the US market.
This has come as a confirmation for many of the observers given that the company last released a new player in 2017. More reports have said that Samsung was working on a high-end Blu-ray player to be released in 2019 but the plans have now been scrapped. However, the Sourh Korean giant has not said why it has decided to exit the business. Yet there is not big single reason for the shift but there are surely a few small ones.
The Blu-ray players of Samsung lacked Dolby Vision HDR support and had relied on the HDR-10 or the Samsung backed HDR-10+. This had proved to be an important omission for the target audience. The feature of Dolby Vision is attractive to the home theatre enthusiasts because of the theoretically superior specifications and also because it allows the movie-makers to more finely tune the experience as compared to the HDR-10. Still there are many people who do not really care about the differences between the HDR-10 and Dolby Vision but the ones who do are the buyers of the UltraHD Blu-ray players who may feel that the bitrate of the content streamed from Amazon, Netflix or Apple is not adequate for their set-ups.
Moreover, streaming has come to dominate the Americans viewing habits especially the high-income households that would be enticed by the expensive 4K HDR Blu-ray players. At present Sony and Panasonic are leading the Blu-ray player market.
Photo Credits: Amazon
