team_negative1 said:

Once DVD's came out, they matched Laserdiscs in resolution. And with remastering, at times, better quality.

So there was no high-end at that time.

Once DVDs came out, it beat LDs in resolution off the bat. LDs don't store pixels, they're an analogue format that is horizontally compressed just like VHS. DVD's can produce 100% of the horizontal fidelity (all 720 pixels). That's equal to 540 lines per picture height (TVL). LDs have a resolution reported to be around 425 TVL, meaning that it has 78.7% of the horizontal information that a DVD can hold.

As for how it looks, that's another matter. LDs can look just as good as early DVD releases (or even better if the MPEG2 compression was rubbish), and for releases based on the same master they can look near identical. It's quite hard to tell the difference in horizontal fidelity when it's only a difference of 21%. This page has a good visual representation.

With 4K BDs though, the main advantage won't be pixel resolution. It'll be the wider colour gamut, the higher bitrates, and the HEVC codec.

Possessed said:

Most peoples ears can't tell a difference. 192 is better for *recording* the audio because it captures more details in the recording process, but once it's recorded downsampling it to 96 or even 48 will be virtually lossless.

I agree entirely, I doubt that I could tell the difference. I was simply pointing out that BD already matches and even beats DCP in terms of audio quality. The UHD-BDs should match or beat DCPs in terms of video quality.