Still on the fence about the Blu-ray format?
I don’t blame you. But the player prices continue to fall and we’re starting to see some discount-priced titles at your local Best Buy store (and other outlets).
And here’s one more reason to make the switch. A sharp eyed reader sent this item along from the June issue of Popular Science:
“Should I re-buy classic movies when they come out on Blu-Ray?”
Yes, Assuming you own a high-def TV. Even the older 35 millimeter film used to shoot classics like Spartacus can deliver upward of 6,000 lines of resolution far more than DVD’s 480 or Blu-Ray’s (and your HDTVs)1080p. When movie studios create their Blu-ray versions, they digitize directly from the original film print, so a remastered Blu-ray will get you much closer to the original quality than a DVD, and for the foreseeable future it will probably remain the maximum resolution widely available for home use.
Having spent years in the remastering trenches, though, I can give an even better reason to upgrade. The quality of the film scanners used to convert film to a digital format has improved dramatically in the past few years. That gives mastering artists more to work with when they apply tools to even out film grain and remove fading,film cuts and other damage that befalls elderly prints. As a result, you’ll see brighter, clearer colors, less variance in quality between scenes, and a sharper image. Ov course sometimes the mastering is so good that it exposes flaws in the original film. For example, did you know that they painted the grass green in the opening segment of The Sound of Music? Old VHS copies looked fine, but when we trasferred it from the original 65 millimeter film, you could tell.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I just picked up the DVD of “Sherlock Holmes” and it had some annoying digital artifacts in several scenes. At first I thought it was just a bad disk, so I borrowed one from a friend who got it from a local store. It had the same problem, a problem that would you not likely see on a low def TV, but stood out like a sore thumb on my 1080p.
What’s interesting about this is that recently made DVDs like “Ironman” or “Indy 4″ have no such issues at high def.
We just had a Blu-Ray player installed during an upgrade of our media computer and we are enjoying it quite a bit. We had no problems with the Blu-Ray “Sherlock Holmes” and thought a lot of the backgrounds (especially the harbor scenes) looked fantastic. We also thought “The Blind Side” looked a lot better on our system than it did at the local cinema. I’ll be curious to see some of the classics as they come out.