Quote:
Originally Posted by Laserdisk
Weird yellow cast on the first?
|
On the UHD? Nope. If anything it reverses the strong orange tinge
of the regular BD.
Watched
Age of Extinction, it's another darned solid UHD. The HDR is again excellent, folks might watch the movie and think "damn, there's a lot
of blown-out highlights here" but when you put in the BD to compare you realise just how much
more highlight information the UHD pulls back whilst still maintaining the same kind
of lighting aesthetic, the 2D Blu is so "nuked" in certain scenes it's not even funny. It's not just the highlights though as the whole image benefits from the HDR pass, looking more rounded and "real", for want
of a better term. Colour doesn't look as outrageously oversaturated as the BD but that's not a bad thing IMO.
For detail the UHD has a nice boost because
of the nasty aliasing on the 2D Blu-ray, this is something that wasn't picked up by any reviews AFAIK but it shimmers and jags like crazy on the finest horizontal and vertical details, look at the grille
of Lucas' Mini as he pulls up to the old cinema at the beginning for example, and it's there throughout the film on 1080p Blu (3D disc looks much better tho). While the UHD doesn't escape this effect completely (look at the chairs that Miss Shortpants is sleeping in when they're in the railcar, their fabric shimmers something chronic as the camera slowly pushes in), in the main those details are cleaner and more finely resolved on the UHD. There's also some banding in the opening shot
of the ships approaching Earth on the BD but it looks perfect on the UHD.
As with DotM the switching between film and digital is perhaps more obvious owing to the sheer cleanliness
of one vs the other, but the 35mm grain looks much tidier than it does on the BD, less noisy and coarse but still retaining that crucial filmic goodness. I've gotta say that I didn't miss the alternating aspect ratios at all, it's used so randomly that the impact
of it is completely lost on me.
I'm not gonna go nuts with more photos but I wanted to show one thing that caught my eye. It's often assumed that a 2K studio upscale won't feature any more spatial detail than the actual 2K BD upscaled at home - some have more, some have less, some are about the same, it all depends on a variety
of factors - but there's something else to consider: chroma resolution. The colour is still encoded as 4:2:0 on 4K to be sure (DV aside, apparently) but 4:2:0 from a 2160p studio-upscaled image has more chroma resolution than 4:2:0 on a 1080p self-upscaled image. To wit: look at this close-in photo
of the red Autobot badge on Prime's chest right at the end
of the film, notice how the BD loses most
of the detailing while the UHD looks much betterer.
[Show spoiler]
BD
UHD
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
... but here states TF 1-4 are real 4k:
... IMDB says 2K DI.
Linear Mode
