I never bought into LD as I never liked the size of the discs so I went from a large video tape collection to buying that first Sony DVD player, the S7000 in 1997. There was no hesitation on my part as I quickly accepted that video tapes would be history in the not too distant future. Shortly after I bought that Sony player in September, 1997, I started reading a certain forum named the "Home Theater Forum". I didn't actually join the forum until about a year or so later.Well I was part of the unwashed "masses" so you're hearing this from the horse's mouth. I didn't have to adopt DVD. I was actually more into laser discs than tape when DVD made its first appearance. I didn't complain about the black bars either. My transition to DVD was fairly quick when I saw the advantages to DVD including picture quality. My transition to blu ray from DVD was a little slower but when some films I wanted that were not on DVD but became available on blu ray (55 Days In Peking for example) I quickly moved to blu ray. I've not adopted to 4K and extremely likely I won't. The emphasis on 4K films tend to be on DC/Marvel blockbuster junk which I'm not interested in. I may change my mind if 4K releases of L'Avventura, Pillow Talk, The High And The Mighty, La Dolce Vita, All About Eve, Johnny Guitar, Nashville, Rebecca, Samson And Delilah, Marnie, Where The Boys Are and Rosemary's Baby become available.