DVD's that look like crap on a big screen? (1 Viewer)

[jim.vaccaro]

It's soft, I'll grant you that, but the colors and blacks look fine to me. Looks like a laserdisc without the noise. I've seen worse.

 

[Patrick McCart]

The color is the only thing it has going for it. Most of the film is "OK" in terms of contrast (not as bad as To Catch a Thief), but it has some really bad moments of contrast being unbalanced.

 

[Tim Mauldin]

It's been a long time since I have watched it but, I recall The American President looking pretty bad. Very grainy from what I remember.

 

[Jeff Whitford]

Im surprised no one mentioned Outland. Now thats bad.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Outland, Jean de Florette and Manon of the springs are the 3 worst looking DVDs in my library. (of course, they look bad on a 13" BW TV too)

 

[Mark Bendiksen]

No kidding, David. Those two movies look bad on my laptop screen, for crying out loud. Absolutely awful transfers.

 

[Vader]

Two pages and no one has mentioned Aliens (1986)?!? Now that has to be the single worst transfer of all time (both the quadrilogy and legacy). Of course, that has much to do with Cameron's original choice of film stock, but did they have to put the DNR into overdrive to "fix" it? Textbook demo material for macroblocking....

My setup:
Display: 65" Mitsu WS65511
Player: Denon DVD1600 (via component)
Viewing Distance: 10'

I checked the title on multiple screens and setups, just to make sure it wasn't mine...

 

[Charlie Phogg]

I'll agree with Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs. What a shame that such outstanding movies received this despicable treatment. We can only hope they will get it right if one of the coming High Def DVD formats manages to be successful.

One newer movie that stands out as being awful in my eyes is House of Sand and Fog. When I watched it at home on my 50" plasma I noticed a lot of shimmering/strobing, about the worst I have seen on my setup. Even more amazing is how bad it was when I took it into work and was watching it on a 27" Sony CRT from a Panasonic RV32 sitting 12' from the screen.

Amazing, don't the people who churn this stuff out even bother to look at what they are putting on the screen before they send it off to production?

 

[jim.vaccaro]

Boondocks Saints. It's horrible on a small screen.

 

[Mark Lucas]

Every dvd is a soft noisy mess up close. Even the best reference transfers interpolated to 1080p using advanced resizing algorithms need to be seen from at least 1.5 screen widths away to look "good".

 

[PattyFraser]

I think that the honor of this award will go to the horrendous copy of "The Shooting Party", (1985) starring James Mason. This is such a wonderful film, doing equal justice to "the British Class system" with Gosford Park--even though it didn't have an equally tauted director--and it deserves a decent transfer, but heck, the transfer on this DVD doesn't even look good on a small screen.
I truly hope it will one day get a new, decent transer.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

True. I critically evaluate DVDs from 1.6 screen width which is just far enough away to let good DVDs produce a "film like" effect but close enough to still get the "movie like" wide-angle experience.