One broken Blu-ray just proved that physical media isn't overhyped – for me, anyway

It's been a bit of a theme of my 2025 that I've gone from something of a sceptic about physical media to a full-blown convert, scouring my local CEX for Blu-rays and proselytising about the benefits of actually owning your media to all and sundry. Still, there's no escaping one fatal flaw at the heart of even the best 4K discs and Blu-rays – they're still discs.

So, while you can keep those sets you buy new in great condition with only a little care, if you buy used ones like I often do, there's always a chance that even a microscopic little scratch can be the end of your viewing session midway through a film.

That happened to me just this week, watching a second-hand copy of Star Trek: Into Darkness (£1.50, thanks for nothing CEX). I'm not going to bat for what is a pretty mediocre sci-fi movie all in all, but that didn't mean I was chill when the whole thing ground to a halt just over an hour into the film.

I already knew something was up, since my PS5 Pro failed to read the disc about three times, even with polishing in between, but once it started up, I thought I was out of the woods. That made it super grating when it died halfway through with no amount of cleaning getting it working.

The only option was to hop over and rent the movie (another £3.50, cheers CEX) so we could finish it – but little did I know that this would be a perfect testing ground for my girlfriend. She's been extremely polite about my physical media obsession, it's fair to say, but outside of rapturously enjoying the 4K re-releases of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, she never necessarily bought into the hype as I do.

Going directly from the disc (1080p with 7.1 Dolby Digital audio) to a streaming version from Apple TV's app, marked as 4K with Dolby Atmos confirmed in my Sonos app, though, was a perfect test – and the disc won. It's not necessarily a matter of sharpness, exactly, although that is a factor, but when it comes to vibrancy of colour and clarity of sound, there was really no contest.

In fact, I only lasted a couple of minutes before pausing the movie again to check whether she'd noticed the difference, and she confirmed that she very much had. Starfleet uniforms that had previously popped off the screen were now a little more muted, and the whole film had a slightly fuzzier look that felt like a clear step down compared to how we'd watched the first half.

That doesn't change the fact that a disc failing is a huge inconvenience, and a clear long-standing issue with the format that won't go away any time soon. Still, it's refreshing for me to confirm that I'm not just imagining the difference that a proper physical source makes for movie-watching.

Now, though, I can't help but feel like I need to get a better setup than my current one in terms of a disc player. I move my PS5 Pro from my office to our living room whenever we want to use a disc, which is a pretty major faff, and it's far from the quietest disc player out there in terms of spinning noises. It's always nice to have a pipe dream, after all.