Grant H
Senior HTF Member
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- Jul 24, 2002
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- Grant H
Not all the early Sony titles were poor, just titles that needed a new master. Underworld Evolution is stunning, and I've read Ultraviolet is excellent as well (too bad the movie isn't better). Black Hawk Down has been out a while too. Also excellent quality. It seems there were really only a handful of poor titles, and some of them (like Terminator 2) were probably treated more harshley than they deserved to be, due to the many apples-and-oranges comparisons of one blu-ray title with another hd dvd title (usually a different era of film and entirely different film stock).
Sure, there were some poor presentations. There was so much disappointment over The Fifth Element, that it's actually going to be remedied with a rerelease.
On the other hand WB consistently uses low bitrate VC-1 transfers, that sometimes deliver digital artifacting on such films as Superman (limited, but definite macroblocking), Superman Returns, and more recently Planet Earth. I much more eagerly gobble up Sony releases, knowing there's a far better chance they'll look good, since they're optimized for the Blu-Ray format, be it 25 or 50 GB, not just ported over and stripped down from the HD DVD version (sometimes squeezing out sound options to go from 30 GB HD DVD to 25 GB Blu-ray I imagine, as there's no way they'll use 50s or take advantage of the capacity, for fear of outshining the HD DVD version). Paramount seems to be much better behaved as a neutral studio, sometimes using different encodes on each format. Though sound has still gotten shafted a couple times on BD.
Back to topic, I'm pretty confident from what I've read the PS3 will be upgradable for all the advanced Java content.
I'm also not too worried that Disney's going to try to decide to kill Blu-ray by releaseing their classics on HD DVD. It's a stretch to think they're going to go neutral, much less change teams and just back HD DVD. Besides, I think they really like the extra storage capacity.
Sure, there were some poor presentations. There was so much disappointment over The Fifth Element, that it's actually going to be remedied with a rerelease.
On the other hand WB consistently uses low bitrate VC-1 transfers, that sometimes deliver digital artifacting on such films as Superman (limited, but definite macroblocking), Superman Returns, and more recently Planet Earth. I much more eagerly gobble up Sony releases, knowing there's a far better chance they'll look good, since they're optimized for the Blu-Ray format, be it 25 or 50 GB, not just ported over and stripped down from the HD DVD version (sometimes squeezing out sound options to go from 30 GB HD DVD to 25 GB Blu-ray I imagine, as there's no way they'll use 50s or take advantage of the capacity, for fear of outshining the HD DVD version). Paramount seems to be much better behaved as a neutral studio, sometimes using different encodes on each format. Though sound has still gotten shafted a couple times on BD.
Back to topic, I'm pretty confident from what I've read the PS3 will be upgradable for all the advanced Java content.
I'm also not too worried that Disney's going to try to decide to kill Blu-ray by releaseing their classics on HD DVD. It's a stretch to think they're going to go neutral, much less change teams and just back HD DVD. Besides, I think they really like the extra storage capacity.
