What Hi-Fi ran this as their Home Cinema Week debate in July, ended up split down the middle, and have now kicked it out to readers. Tom Parsons argued the hardware case, that USTs and 100-inch sets have made a big picture trivially easy compared to a decade ago. Alastair Stevenson argued the cost of living makes the whole question academic. Daniel Furn pointed out that 4K Blu-ray still beats the top streaming tier, which means most people are watching in a worse format than the one that already exists.
Both sides are right because they are measuring different things. The ceiling has never been higher. A midrange TV now does things a flagship could not do in 2016, and a usable UST in an ordinary lit living room was science fiction not that long ago. The floor and the median have gone the other way. The median film watched in a living room in 2026 is a compressed stream, on a set left in whatever mode it shipped in, through the panel's own speakers, with dialogue normalisation fighting the mix.
The golden age framing also quietly assumes availability. Kill Bill and a long list of others still have no disc. Titles leave streaming with no notice. So the enthusiast in 2026 has better hardware and worse ownership than the enthusiast in 2012, and which of those you weigh more heavily is the entire argument.
What settles it for me: if you are happy renting access, this is not a golden age. If you buy discs and you have a room you can darken, it obviously is.
Where do you land, and does the disc question decide it for you too?
Both sides are right because they are measuring different things. The ceiling has never been higher. A midrange TV now does things a flagship could not do in 2016, and a usable UST in an ordinary lit living room was science fiction not that long ago. The floor and the median have gone the other way. The median film watched in a living room in 2026 is a compressed stream, on a set left in whatever mode it shipped in, through the panel's own speakers, with dialogue normalisation fighting the mix.
The golden age framing also quietly assumes availability. Kill Bill and a long list of others still have no disc. Titles leave streaming with no notice. So the enthusiast in 2026 has better hardware and worse ownership than the enthusiast in 2012, and which of those you weigh more heavily is the entire argument.
What settles it for me: if you are happy renting access, this is not a golden age. If you buy discs and you have a room you can darken, it obviously is.
Where do you land, and does the disc question decide it for you too?
