Unforgiven 4K UHD (1992)

[Bates_Motel]

Originally Posted by AKORIS

and yet there's been quite a few posts lately about freezing 4k discs on Sony and LG players...........

Never had a 4K disc freeze on my Sony.

[legends of beyond]

Originally Posted by MD-Blu

How's the PQ and is it worth upgrading?

This is a gorgeous transfer, and after the previous BD disaster, a much-welcomed release.

[heinzw]

Unforgiven froze in my Oppo 205 about halfway through. Disc is spotless. Haven't tried it again, but will later tonight.

Must be a bad batch out there.

[heinzw]

Ok, this is weird. Tried playing the movie again, resuming where I left off. Messed up immediately. Reloaded the disc and started over this time from the beginning. Played all the way through without so much as one single glitch. Strange, but I'm certainly glad it worked this time. Guess I don't need a replacement disc after all.

[guachi]

Looks like Best Buy has this on sale for $20 this week. I went and bought it and several other UHD movies that were marked down to $20.

[gwsat]

Originally Posted by guachi

Looks like Best Buy has this on sale for $20 this week. I went and bought it and several other UHD movies that were marked down to $20.

Good choice! You will remember the quality of this great film long after you have forgotten the price of the disk it came on.

[Charlie_C]

Originally Posted by heinzw

Unforgiven froze in my Oppo 205 about halfway through. Disc is spotless. Haven't tried it again, but will later tonight.

Must be a bad batch out there.

Not that I'm pleased to hear of more faulty discs but I had to return two copies in the end and then gave up. So pleased to hear it's a bad batch and not my player. It also makes sense though as my player hasn't had issues with any other discs.

[Chloenator]

Originally Posted by legends of beyond

This is a gorgeous transfer, and after the previous BD disaster, a much-welcomed release.

After reading reviews on it, I decided to get it as 1 of my 4K titles from the Amazon 3 for $49.99 sale.

[JosieWales]

I love this movie, but strangely, I did not own it on Blu Ray (just on VHS). After reading the good reports on this thread, I thought I should pick it up. We watched it last night, and while I don't regret the purchase, I must say that the PQ mostly looks average at best. There are some scenes that look great, but not all that many.

[ROSS.T.G.]

Originally Posted by JosieWales

I love this movie, but strangely, I did not own it on Blu Ray (just on VHS). After reading the good reports on this thread, I thought I should pick it up. We watched it last night, and while I don't regret the purchase, I must say that the PQ mostly looks average at best. There are some scenes that look great, but not all that many.

If you would have seen the DVD and old Blu-ray you would have rubbed the 4K all over your body saying “oh yeah...”

[Pyoko]

Have to agree, really nice transfer. Fine grain, decent amount of sharpness and detail in the grassy fields, nice natural colors, no teal and fairly subtle HDR. Just a really proper 4K presentation of the typical naturalistic, muted, anamorphic Clint Eastwood picture. I really enjoy this look and hope we get to see some more, would love Mystic River and Changeling especially.

It's a significant upgrade over the remastered BD, but that's largely because the BD has quite poor colors. It seems to go in every direction, has lots of ugly magenta skintones, sometimes looks really flattened, at other times boosted. The dark interior scenes look impressive at first glance but you quickly get the feeling they're too thick and over-saturated. The opening looks pretty bad, washed in some pinkish-red tone instead of the orange sunset on the UHD. I suspect it was down-converted from the HDR grade and then maybe tweaked slightly, but regardless it's very clear it didn't receive anywhere close to the same amount of love.

This is why it's good to be on the 4K/HDR train even if the detail increase is marginal or the HDR unimpressive, because I think there's a chance we're going to see an increased number of unoptimized SDR BDs that are more like afterthoughts.

The only real issue I have with the UHD is that there are a couple of shots where they've tried to key out the skies to grade separately and it's resulted in some really broken, noisy and artifacted edges. The BD has the exact same artifacts which is what made me think it was an automatic conversion.

The Dolby Vision presentation of this on iTunes is also very, very good compression wise, you wouldn't lose too much compared to the disc. Really impressed by Warner here, especially since all the digital copies from Sony I've checked out (normally so great when it comes to discs) have all looked awful (Starship Troopers, Dracula, Close Encounters.)

[Geoff D]

Yep, the new BD is just too ruddy in the faces, they all look like they've got sunburn. Not an unreasonable thing to happen when you're out in the sun all day on horseback, sure, but it just looks plain distracting as you say. And the blacks do indeed look a bit too plugged up in comparison to the HDR.

[andreasy969]

caps has Unforgiven as well now: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=11429&d2=10409&c=4168

And I don't think it ever made made it to the top of the list, because I think I would've noticed. Same with E.T. imo, which I also almost did "for nothing" today.

[StingingVelvet]

Subtle's the word, but that UHD is definitely an improvement.

[Geoff D]

Strange that they're not bumping the UHD additions to the top like they do with any newly-added comparison, even if it's only to add a new source to an existing one. Thanks for the tip-off andreas.

Anyhoo, I'm glad that they're up because it proves what I said about the detail increase in the 4K: subtle, but more obvious the wider the shots get, like on the shacks in this shot https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&...101408&i=3&l=0 which is EXACTLY the one I had in mind when I wrote this:

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Regarding detail, there IS more refinement in the UHD. It's a mighty close run thing to be sure and again proves that in real-world circumstances 35mm is reaching the limits of resolution in 4K but it hits you in the long-distance shots, things like the detail on houses and barns (with their myriad straight lines, being made out of planks of wood and all) are more finely rendered. Reminds me of Magnificent Seven's UHD in that respect.

[StingingVelvet]

That shot also really shows how the color is more restrained but in a good way. Green grass looks less neon, brown looks more textured.

[HeavyHitter]

For me, I would say the UHD BD is better than subtle both in detail (especially at 124" projected) but even more so in color. The remastered BD has some overblown odd color going on when I compared.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by HeavyHitter

For me, I would say the UHD BD is better than subtle both in detail (especially at 124" projected) but even more so in color. The remastered BD has some overblown odd color going on when I compared.

The colour we know about, I've been railing against the far too ruddy-looking remastered BD for a while. The detail is subtle for the most part but it's a cumulative effect of having it resolve itself better into the distance plus the grain looking finer and less noisy. There are some shots that are stand-outs for detail for sure but only because they've got so much finery going on, e.g. the details on the rocks here: http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a...101413&i=7&l=0

Originally Posted by StingingVelvet

That shot also really shows how the color is more restrained but in a good way. Green grass looks less neon, brown looks more textured.

I mentioned this much earlier in the thread but the UHD actually has more in common with the colour scheme on the old transfer than it does on the newer BD, funnily enough. It's like whoever graded the new SDR master fell into the modern trap of pushing the saturation on the trim pass, rather than letting it breathe like the UHD does. Could I have done with a touch more saturation on the UHD in places? Yes, but that's splitting hairs as I'll still take the UHD over any other version in a heartbeat.

[HeavyHitter]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The colour we know about, I've been railing against the far too ruddy-looking remastered BD for a while. The detail is subtle for the most part but it's a cumulative effect of having it resolve itself better into the distance plus the grain looking finer and less noisy. There are some shots that are stand-outs for detail for sure but only because they've got so much finery going on, e.g. the details on the rocks here:

Agreed - cumulative for sure. I mean it's not a huge improvement but enough to where the detail improvement and film grain refinement was rather noticeable in motion so I don't refer to it as subtle in that sense. The BD just looked a bit more "smudgy" for lack of better words although the color didn't help with that either. I also find when all things are equal, the encoding on UHD BD really stands out.

[Croweyes1121]

I have FINALLY figured out why this disc looked so incredibly dark to me. It’s the ASBL setting on my E6! I had to get into the service menu and turn it off. Now everything looks great! The ending of the film was just so dark that the TV was misinterpreting the final sequences as static imagery and automatically dimming the display. Ordinarily, this isn’t an issue, but with material that’s already this dark to begin with, it made all the difference in the world.