Blu-Ray Best Of The Best - for discussing releases only

[Salsa Party Animal]

Spiderman trilogy (from Amazon.co.uk) Can I use it on Region A (USA) PS3 ?

Just asking before ordering it.

[talizker]

Spiderman trilogy (from Amazon.co.uk) Can I use it on Region A (USA) PS3 ?

Just asking before ordering it.

You sure can. The UK Spidey films are Regions A,B & C

[elaniel]

I thought the 3rd one was region encoded, or was that the Region A box only?

[Lyris]

Just watched The Simpsons Movie (USA) on BD. I imagine most people will say this looks excellent because there's no dirt, noise, colour bleed etc etc, in fact it mostly looks exactly as an all-digital limited animation film should.

Except that it's been filtered. Ringing around high frequency objects, which means it's compromised but not bad. But it really goes to show you that the authoring houses really don't seem to have a clue what they're doing - they have the best part of 50gb to play with, BD's wonderfully high data transfer rates - and they still can't do an encode of an all-digital, noiseless, grainless, blemish-free source of a limited animation film right. It looks good, but it should have looked flawless - pixel perfect.



Good thing the film's a bit of a stinker or I'd be annoyed. Deluxe buggers up another one.

The funniest thing is, the Futurama teaser trailer at the start of the disc is flawless (apart from the part that they forgot to deinterlace... right where the narrator says "Asinine morons at Fox"... love that timing )

[TonyDA]

Shows you how you shouldn't base everything you believe on reviews or other people's opinions. I quite like this site, and have gone by some of their reviews, but this is how they rated The Simpsons 'flawless' transfer:

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/1164/simpsonsmovie.html

The same reviewer also raved about Eastern Promises video transfer on HD-DVD - whereas I thought it patchy, to say the least.

Lyris - at least it was The Simpsons, and not Ratatouille. Now that is a stunning transfer.

[Lyris]

Indeed

And yeah, if you read High Def Digest's reviews, you'll notice that many of them go on about colour, colour bleed, black level (i.e. things that are very rarely issues with digital video anyway!) but fail to mention the point we bought these formats in the first place - detail.

I'm sure people on this site will know that I accept other people's opinions but hate abuse of "flawless". I think a 4/5 is fair.

By the way TonyDA, the same reviewer awarded the HD DVD of "TRAFFIC" a 4/5 rating for video quality when that release was, in fact, a 480i up-convert of the NTSC DVD master. I have to be careful what I say because I write hardware reviews for a competing review site - can't slander others - but I don't think anyone can get by without scratching their heads there.

[TonyDA]

Yeah, I've read your competitive stuff - very impressive.

I really do think you have to go by your own opinions with HD - perhaps more than DVD or audio for some reason, though I'm not really sure why. I've seen Shrek and Ratatouille on HD-DVD/BR, for example, and I'd say Ratatouille is a much more impressive transfer. Ask me why, and I'm not sure (maybe there's more detail with Pixar's effort?) - yet both score 5/5 for video quality on most sites.

Mind you, if you consistently read on a forum like this that a lot of people are unhappy with the HD treatment of a particular film - Fox's BR release of Robocop springs to mind - then that is a much more reliable guide.

[Lyris]

Ratatouille has that slight soft focus look (on the film itself I mean), which I think helps it look more like a film and less like that ultra-high-detail video game look. CG movies that are chock-full of detail can be overwhelming and end up looking jarring to me.

But, it's the way the film is meant to look and the transfer hasn't been tampered with so it looks right, and has high detail (Remy's fur, clothing textures, hair) where you'd expect it to. The same can't be said for stuff that's had its detail flattened out during encoding, something like The Simpsons which has had the frequencies in the picture cut-off at a certain point.

I've not seen Shrek 3 on HD DVD but have heard it's technically excellent.

[TonyDA]

Don't get me wrong; I couldn't find fault with Shrek 3, just that Ratatouille is better. As you say, the detail is very high on aspects like fur - and Shrek doesn't have fur!

[dc-arena]

Has anyone here got the Bladerunner 5 disc boxset on Blu-Ray? If so, how is it? It seems to be amazingly well priced, so it would be nice to finally have this in the collection..

[JP]

There's no reason not to get it, it's not perfect but it's as close as you'll get for some time.

You may as well get the 5 disc version as it's often cheaper than the UK 2 disc version.

[Lyris]

Has anyone here got the Bladerunner 5 disc boxset on Blu-Ray? If so, how is it? It seems to be amazingly well priced, so it would be nice to finally have this in the collection..

I have the HD DVD version and it's wonderful. It doesn't always look as amazing as today's digitally intermediate sourced movies but it's the very best analogue-sourced film I've seen.

[ne0star]

Play are selling Tekkonkinkreet for £13.99 at the moment. It will probably go up when its released on Monday, but I think its worth a punt at that price so I have gone for it.

http://www.play.com/DVD/Blu-ray/4-/3595505/Tekkonkinkreet/Product.html

[Mad Gear]

Play are selling Tekkonkinkreet for ?13.99 at the moment. It will probably go up when its released on Monday, but I think its worth a punt at that price so I have gone for it.

http://www.play.com/DVD/Blu-ray/4-/3...t/Product.html

I've been on the verge of getting this recently from the US. Wish i knew if it would be region-free or not (as i've a US PS3).

[JP]

Pre-ordered it about a week back, they also have Paprika at teh same price if you pre-order.