I just finished watching the new Blu-Ray of THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE and thought I'd make a few comments here.
Video:
The whole movie looked darker to me than I'd remembered it from the last time I looked at the non-anamorphic DVD. The Blu-Ray image was clear as a bell for the most part, with noticeable grain in spots, but everything just seemed a shade too dark to me. Images were lost in dark shadows and corners. So I compared it to the DVD with a side-by-side feature on my Sony television. There's a definite difference in the brightness levels between the DVD and the BR. The DVD looked like a TV with the brightness setting too high, so that black areas had a grayish look to them. The Blu-Ray again looked like it was a shade too far the other way, losing some image in a black crush.
Color:
The Blu-Ray color balance looked natural to me. If you look on one of my earlier posts in this thread, you'll see a comparison of the DVD and the old LD transfer, and I discuss there the overly pinkish hues that were prevailing on the LD. That was toned down on the DVD, but compared to the BR, the DVD is still too pink-looking. In one scene, part of a wall of the subway car looked a natural greenish color on the Blu-Ray, where the DVD had washed that color out to a gray.
Audio:
It's mono all the way here with the main English track being a 2.0 dts track. There's also a Dolby Digital 2.0 French and another one in Spanish. The mono 2.0 dts track acted strangely on my audio receiver. Instead of pushing all of the audio to my center channel speaker, it fed the mono track to my two left-right channel speakers. With most Dolby Digital movies that are in 2.0 mono, the sound processor forces everything out to the center channel speaker. This one just seemed a little odd to me - not bad, just different from my usual. The audio track on the English 2.0 dts sounds clean, clear and crisp - quite good for a mid-70's audio track.
Lost in the upgrade is the old static menu on the DVD had David Shire's theme music in stereo. On the Blu-Ray, there IS no static menu at all. The movie plays after the legal notices without operator intervention. There is only a pop-up menu to get to the "Play", "Chapters", "Setup" and "Extras" sections. Upon finishing, the movie simply restarted rather than going to any kind of menu.
The disc's packaging has both MGM and 20th Century Fox logos. When you play the disc, you get a 20th Century Fox Home Video logo at the start, and on the film itself is a UA logo.
Overall I'm thrilled to have one of my favorite seemingly forgotten movies upgraded to the latest technologies, but I guess I'm just not used to seeing it so dark. Now, I know that subways are inherently dark places, but even the bright, sunny streets of New York look a little underdone here. I'll be interested to see what others come up with on their viewings.
Harry
