Great review, Mike! RM is one of my favorite shows and that season was a great one, starting with Tommy and his brother's....disagreement all the way to the blazing end. Glad the new season is only a week or so away.
I can't wait but I hope I can find it on release day. I have yet to find Weeds season 1 at my local brick and mortars and my local Best Buy told me today that they don't have any Rescue Me S3 BDs in their computer or on order...
Like Battlestar Galactica (and, yes, scores of other FX & Sci-Fi shows), it's baffling to me why we have to wait so long for these season sets to finally see these programs not just in hi-def, but in a non-letterboxed/pillarboxed format. I got into the show last year and went on a marathon tear of shows during season 3 and it was painful to go from the DVD versions -- much less HD-DVD (which I own) and Blu-Ray (which I don't; my DVD set is en route from DDD) -- to the crappy broadcast versions on-air. At least the storytelling is so strong that it outweights the image problems I'm likely to be seeing once again starting next week with Season 4. I'm still stunned that FX doesn't have a a hi-def feed.
"Unfortunately, at this time I’m only able to access to Dolby Digital soundtrack because it’s an undisputable fact that uncompressed lossy codecs are not transparent and I’ve experienced it first hand in my system when I first started reviewing Sony Blu-ray discs last year on a different BD player."
Can you explain what you mean here? I'm not sure what "uncompressed lossy" is. PCM is uncompressed lossless and Dolby is compressed lossy and there is a big difference between the two.
Are you saying there's no difference and that's why you're basing your review on the DD track?
Has anyone else experienced some weird shimmering in certain scenes? In Episode 9 on Disc 3, when the african american employee is telling Jerry that he might want to forget about his wife so the alzheimers doesn't claim both of them, the swatches on his blue sweater are flickering like crazy. We're talking way more than just grain/noise, the things look like LEDs. It does it consistently while the camera is aimed at him, then the camera cuts to the woman and everything is normal, then back to him and the flickering is still there. Later in the season (I forget what episode), Tommy is wearing a shirt of a similar color of blue, and there's similar flickering.
I can't imagine it's a disc defect, as it's pretty specific and consistent. I'm using a PS3 hooked up via HDMI, outputting at 1080i (my TV can't do 1080p). I'm figuring it's just something weird in the transfer, but it'd be nice to have someone corroborate my experience and possibly test at both 1080i and 1080p and see if the problem is there for both.