One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest - another victim of overzealous DNR?

[#Darren]

Video:
Warner Bros. offer the 1.85:1 ratio, Blu-ray picture in a VC-1, 1080p, BD25 transfer taken from a digital master created from restored elements. So you'll find no lines, scratches, or age marks here. Despite this, given that director Foreman filmed entirely on location and went for as realistic a style as he could get, the WB video engineers still probably didn't have the absolute best video with which to work. Warners Bros. already made a good standard-def DVD release a few years back, where the new transfer displayed a sharper image than the studio's earliest SD issue, this time with deeper colors and far less evidence of age deterioration. What I did find in that later SD release, though, was a somewhat granular aspect to many objects on screen. Evidently, for the high-definition BD edition the video engineers tried to mitigate this slightly grainy appearance and in the process seem to have softened the picture too much. In comparing the BD image with an upscaled SD image in scene after scene, I had difficulty telling many of them apart. In medium and long shots, the Blu-ray had a distinct advantage in clarity and object delineation, but in facial close-ups, the grainier standard-def picture appeared to have more detail, the BD being too smoothed over.

What we get on the Blu-ray disc, then, is a picture quality that varies from crystal clear and razor sharp to remarkably soft and blurred, almost from shot to shot. About half the time the BD picture doesn't look any better than the SD release. Fortunately, colors remain as natural as ever, and there is nothing that cries out as desperately bad. Still, the source material may not have always been the best, even cleaned up, and for the BD picture my guess is that WB overcompensated in the filtering department.

http://www.dvdtown.com/reviews/one-f...os-nest/6077/2