Blu-ray Hall of Shame (1 Viewer)

[AnthonyClarke]

I feel it would be worth having a thread devoted to naming (and shaming) the worst Blu ray releases. It may be a futile gesture, but perhaps someone out there will notice and add to pressure to have the worst faults rectified. I thought of this last night when we had a few friends over to watch Region A's 'The Big Country' on my big-screen projector set-up. It's a wonderful movie and most aspects of the transfer were fine ... but I'm particularly sensitive to incorrect screen ratio and the stretched images really grated. The landscape looked ok (bigger than big) but the fat bodies and faces were really unecessary. So that's on top of my 'shame' list. Next, for reasons detailed here eloquently by Mr Harris, come 'My Fair Lady' and 'Vertigo'. And I have nothing but scorn for the clowns who released the Region B transfer to Blu-ray of the excellent biopic 'The Buddy Holly Story' , an example of where the Blu-ray is hugely inferior to the standard DVD, with poor image and faded colours. Fi nally, in this personal list, comes the classic television drama 'Brideshead Revisited', another case where the Blu-ray image is markedly inferior to the DVD, with Acord apparently being given film elements with almost all the colour bleached from the 16mm original.

 

[Matt Hough]

II think The Color of Money and the latest release of Predator would be worthy of the Hall of Shame.

 

[Ray H]

Certainly the most notorious Hall of Shamers are Gladiator, Patton, Out of Africa and Gangs of New York - all of which have been thankfully re-released with good transfers. Of the BDs I own, I think the worst looking are The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Mummy (1999).

 

My Fair Lady

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Fleischer Studios' Gulliver's Travels, which is a stretched 4x3 transfer. Any Echo Bridge or Mill Creek titles that have 2.35 movies cropped to 16x9 and/or only have a 2-channel track when the movie was released with a 5.1 track.

 

[dana martin]

My Fair Lady would have to top my current, as the others have had a better re-release, but i agree that this is a good thread to have.

 

[RobHam]

Trio of Westerns: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Rio Bravo The Horse Soldiers All three exhibit the same frustrating jumps in quality from scene to scene - when its good its very good, but when its bad, it makes you want to throw the damn thing out the window