This is the movie that looks the best on 4K Blu-ray

[NotSure70]

"The Shawshank Redemption" is not only an excellent movie, its 4K Blu-ray is absolute perfection when it comes to picture quality. Sound quality doesn't fall far behind, being a DTS-HD that has really nice deep bass and clarity. I was very surprised when I did a search here and there's no thread for this movie.

I have an extensive collection of Blu-rays and 4K Blu-rays, I think about 400 or so, along with a C2 LG OLED, and a Panasonic DP-UB820-K player. My home theater sound setup is not high end, but well equalized to let me appreciate both movies and music well.

I can't say I remember having any 4K Blu-rays that I thought had a horrible picture quality, but I have some that are rather unimpressive, even if they are scanned from film. And I have some pretty good film era movies that look great on 4K Blu-ray, like The Fugitive.

But I couldn't believe how good The Shawshank Redemption was on 4K Blu-ray. The Blu-ray version I had, a combo with The Green Mile, wasn't bad at all. If anything, the blacks were a little crushed, which is something that is very noticeable on OLED TV sets, because basically blacks are pixels that are not lit, so it's an area of total darkness.

The 4K Blu-ray version doesn't have that problem, because the colorist bumped the dark areas just a notch, so there's still a lot of contrast, but the dark areas are not pure black, so you can see detail and texture there.

It's amazing that a movie done 32 years ago on film looks this good. Film might be great, but it degrades with time, and three decades is quite a lot. So it seems to me that the master reels for this movie were kept in a climate controlled room, because this looks spotless. I don't remember a single scratch in the whole movie.

But the main thing is, the movie looks amazing. Detail, color, everything looks like the best film and 4K Blu-ray has to offer. It's funny because Christopher Nolan, one of the best directors in film history, who is one of the directors that fight the industry's move to digital and shoots on film, often speaks about how film has much better quality than digital if it's well done.

But to be honest, the 4K Blu-ray versions of his movies are about the worst I've seen when it comes to that medium. One of my favorite movies, "The Prestige", to me looks better on the plain 2006 Blu-ray than it does on its 4K Blu-ray version. The others are not as bad, but none of them makes me think "Wow, this movie looks so good!".