A few words about...™ Howards End -- in Blu-ray - Page 7

Following up on the above comments about the distortion of the video image with the block/grid artifacts---I have never encountered that problem with the Blu-Ray of "Howard's End" during playback on the various Blu-Ray players I have owned since I purchased that title (Samsung, Sony and Oppo). However, I did encounter that problem with playback of Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd" on my Sony player---the first sequence following the opening credits (in which the title character arrives in London at night) was close to unwatchable due to the block/grid artifacts. When I recently replaced the Sony with an Oppo, I played the opening sequence of "Sweeney" on the Oppo for comparison --- no block/grid problems.

No, the film does not just look this way. I saw it projected from both 35mm and 70mm prints on it's original theatrical release over 20 times, since I worked at the theater where it premiered. Again, that is not film grain, it's digital noise. I was raised in film and know what film grain looks like.

And regarding the Super 35 to Scope process mentioned above, the IPs are an optical crop of the original Super 35mm negative. Howards End was shot Common Top, which means when it is time to make the IPs, the 2.35:1 image is slide up to the top portion of the Super 35mm frame because that is where all the action was choreographed. In broadcasting the film on television, the image is opened up to the 4x3 aspect ratio it was also framed for during production and therefore on standard def televisions it had a comfortable 4x3 image with every character in a medium shot. The Remains of the Day was shot Common Center, which means that the 4x3 image (if it's ever shown that way anymore on television) has the characters with their heads almost in the center of the frame, an odd amount of head room.

But no Howards End looked spectacular projected in both 70mm blowup and 35mm scope. The 70mm had more subdued color whereas the 35mm scope prints had more punch to the color. Grain was very fine and certainly not the digital gnat storm I and many others are getting on this BD. At this writing, I've still not had another disc behave and look this bad, which you would think would occur again if the problem was my set up.

I had the same thing happen with The House Of The Devil. On my parents' Insignia Blu-Ray player, it had extremely harsh noise in many scenes, but on my PS3 it looked perfectly fine.

Common Top and Common Center - holy mackerel - never heard those terms before! I wonder what ol' Tommy Edison must think of what's become of his little invention.

I had another look at my Howards End bluray yesterday. I was one of those who previously commented on the strange digital noise that was apparent on this bluray, particularly in darker scenes. I especially noticed it in the closing credits - the black background looked like a blizzard of noise.

On looking at it again yesterday, it wasn't half as bad - I could barely notice the noise. How can this be? My theory is this:

When we first watched this bluray right through, it was a night-time in a darkened room. Yesterday, I was viewing the picture during daylight hours in a fairly brightly lit room. While it was bright, the brightness and colour balance of the image still looked great and overall, the picture looked lovely. So I think that my previous concern about the noise being dominant in the darker scenes was due to the dark viewing environment. This doesn't mean that the noise isn't there - just that it's presence may be noticed to a greater or lesser extent depending on the ambient light of the viewing environment.

I still feel that there is some unnatural sharpening or something that has been applied to the image - but overall, I think it's a nice looking bluray image