Are 4K Blu-Ray Discs Region Locked?

With the explosion in streaming over the last decade, people want to tell you that physical media is dead as a doornail. Yes, the market has shrunk dramatically and stores like Best Buy have stopped selling Blu-rays, but there are still plenty of us stocking our shelves with Blu-ray discs, whether they be for our favorite movies or new discoveries put out by boutique distribution labels. I am one of these collectors, currently sporting a collection of over 3,100 titles and counting. While the Blu-ray labels are what drives most of the purchases I make, there's no denying that the 4K UHD Blu-rays also make up a sizable percentage of what makes it onto the shelf. These are discs that display films and television shows in the highest fidelity currently commercially available for home viewing.

One of the most appealing things about 4K UHD Blu-rays is their accessibility. Yes, you do need to have a 4K television and player, be it one of many dedicated 4K UHD players or a device like a PlayStation 5 or XBOX Series X that have disc drives, but if you have those, you are good to go with any 4K disc you come across. 4K UHD Blu-rays are free from any region locking, meaning that the same disc can be played in any part of the world. If you are in the United States, you can import a 4K Blu-ray from France and be able to play it on any 4K-enabled device without issue and vice versa. This might seem like a small thing, but the deeper you go into Blu-ray collecting, the more you realize just how important being region-free can be.

If you pick up your average Blu-ray or DVD and look at the bottom of the back cover, you will see a line of symbols. One of those symbols indicates what region that particular disc is enabled. In the case of Blu-rays, it will be either an A, B, or C, and for DVDs, it will be a number between 1 and 8. Putting a Blu-ray that is region B into a player made for region A discs will result in nothing more than an error code.

For the serious physical media collectors out there, importing is a vital part of how we build out collections. In the United States, we have players that are built for region A discs, but companies like Radiance, Arrow Video, Second Sight, and more produce some of the highest quality releases of films. They often have the exclusive rights to or have certain features only available on their releases. Importing these discs is fairly simple thanks to the Internet, but they're very often region-locked to a different region. If that is the case, you need to purchase a region-free Blu-ray player, which can be quite pricey (but crucial), or you just need to hope that they are region-free discs, indicated by an "A, B, and C" label for Blu-rays or Region 0 for DVDs.

Going back to 4K UHD Blu-rays, you don't have to worry about this in the slightest. If you are happy using your region A-locked PS5 to play discs, you are free to get 4K discs from any part of the world without worry, making them a great entry point for new collectors.