Ethan Riley
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2005
- Messages
- 4,286
- Real Name
- Ethan Riley
I have a theory. Seeing as how Target suddenly plopped out a half-dozen cheap catalog releases on blu-ray for a whopping $5.00, are we seeing the beginning of a virtual avalanche of such discs? The general consensus among forum members seems to be that the Target discs were hit-or-miss, but in the end those same members seemed fairly happy with them. It looks like the discs were probably transfers of existing hi-def masters and weren't remastered or restored especially for blu. Fair enough. While I consider myself an armchair film preservationist and feel that every film deserves to be restored and/or preserved for home video, I realize that in reality only the biggest A-list marquee titles will ever receive such treatment, and sometimes not even then. So we upgrade existing dvd titles to blu. While the films may or may not be presented in an ideal format, customized for blu, we'll still be getting them in high definition. For some of these catalog titles, that may be enough for the present time. They at least look acceptable. But is this a good thing or a bad thing? When dvd first started getting popular, circa 1997, I instantly "upgraded" some of my favorite catalog titles that I'd had on vhs. While the picture quality wasn't necessarily much better, all I could think at the time was that digital media was a lot more reliable than video tape. I at least felt that the image quality was improved simply because discs don't suffer from the same fluctuations and limitations that video tapes do--warping and so on. So for me, that was enough, and I wouldn't have to worry about preservation as much because discs are more durable than videos in terms of temperature, moisture and so on. The upgrade from dvd to blu is similar in that in a proper blu release, the image quality is fivefold. A blu-ray done right is going to make you forget what that same film looked like on dvd. But again--that's only if they did it right. We all have blu-rays that were ports and look sub-par, or blu-rays were the digital mastering experts went loco and had too much fun fiddling with the edge enhancement knobs or rejiggered the sound to the point where you barely recognize your favorite film. I think with a sudden thrust for cheaper catalog releases on blu, we'll see a lot more of the same. As I said, the films will probably be acceptable in the format, without being optimal. But the same thing happened with dvd--at the beginning you only saw the current big blockbusters and a handful of A-list vintage releases that were deemed worthy of the new format. Then as a couple of years went by, and dvd began to dominate the marketplace over vhs, you saw hundreds of older catalog releases popping out by the cartloads, mostly on the cheap. And they were hit or miss. Now it's happening again. The debate: is the blu-ray format so precious that we only want to reserve it for catalog titles that were done with the proper restoration, time and care and lots of money invested in the product? Or are we going to be happy with the catalog titles released on blu as they are--existing prints remastered for high def, looking acceptable, but lacking in that optimum potential that we all know a really good blu-ray can offer?
