Quote:
Originally Posted by javy
Why? Cause you dont want the remastered blu ray?
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Pretty much -- this is the thing I've been saying about rebuying certain titles over and over again as they are released in a new format. I understand that there should be some image improvement just from the jump to a higher resolution alone -- such as films we may have had on DVD and then bought in 1080p Blu-ray, and now 1080p Blu-rays jumping to 2160p (I think it is?) 4K/UHD -- but I've been burned too many times with certain titles that I double or triple dipped on, only to feel that the version with the higher resolution didn't look all that much different from the DVD I replaced...
Here are some examples: When I replaced my Warner snapper case DVD version of
The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen with the original digibook Blu-ray version, the Blu-ray didn't look -- to MY eyes -- all that much more spectacular than the DVD it replaced on MY setup. Sure, it may have been slightly more detail-rich and boasted some other small improvements, but for the most part it looked very similar to the upconverted DVD. The same issues I had with the film's transfer itself were there on the Blu-ray, but just in higher resolution glory (making some of these elements WORSE the way I saw it), such as the ridiculously thick film grain throughout many sequences and the softness in other scenes that really didn't improve with the 1080p encode. The way I saw it, Warner seemed to have taken the master of
The Version You've Never Seen (already digitally cleaned up for the home video release) DVD and simply ported it over to a Blu-ray Disc. The same thing happened when I bought Fox's first
Independence Day BD release (it looked very similar to the Limited Edition DVD transfer I sold off; from what I learned, though, Fox was using outdated masters for films of this era like
Fight Club and
ID4 for their BD transfers).
Now, this COULD be because my Oppo Blu-ray player does such an excellent job of upconverting DVDs to near-high-def, but I am only reporting what I can see.
When Anchor Bay first released its
Halloween Blu-ray (under the Starz! moniker), I was solely disappointed with that disc -- to my eyes, the grain structure and color algorithms didn't look right compared to the (admittedly softer and more artifact-ridden) THX DVD. I have not seen the Anniversary edition of the
Halloween Blu-ray (the last one released as a standalone digibook and then in the franchise box set) so I don't know what it looks like, but my worry is that I buy yet another version of
Halloween (now in 4K -- though I don't have a player yet) and it simply looks like the previously-released Blu, albeit at a somewhat higher resolution...
Now don't get me wrong -- I understand that repurposing or remastering a title from scratch for a new resolution is a very expensive proposition for a studio, and this cost would be passed on to us, as fans and consumers (it would probably make most of these releases completely unaffordable)...but I feel that perhaps many of these could be offered at, say, a $40 or $45 price point and enthusiasts would be willing to buy their favorite titles at such cost knowing the film was given a brand-new 4K re-minting (I know I would) rather than a port-over of some kind.