Time for some more thoughts, now that I've picked my jaw up off the floor. This looks so insanely good on UHD that I almost couldn't concentrate on the movie, and when I put in the 2D Blu I was absolutely shocked at how soft and dull it looked in comparison. Not even A/B'ing, just right off the bat (heh).
First thing: detail. While there may not be a ton of actual spatial resolution to be gained, presuming that this is a 2K upscale, it's got so much more texture than the BD. I don't just mean all the little nicks and smudges on the character models but the image itself, it's got a fine layer of what I'll call "grain" which really helps to break up the light and the solid blocks of colour and makes them react more realistically to the "camera". This combined with the virtual "anamorphic" lensing (just like on Lego Movie) gives it a palpable sense of depth.
Next up: colour. This I am almost still speechless about because I've never seen anything like it, the colour is so deep and rich and intense that when combined with that enhanced sense of depth it becomes almost three-dimensional. I know I say that a lot but here it's genuinely not hyperbole, at times I felt I could reach into the screen and the colour is so luscious I find it hard to believe that this is 'only' P3, it'd be great if someone could get a look at the metadata on this one. On the BD the colours tend to merge into one another if they're near enough in the spectrum but here, wow, there's so much delineation between shades which is what adds to that feeling of separation and depth.
Next: HDR. This is kind of an odd one because on the one hand it doesn't seem to reveal a huge amount of highlight detail vs the BD (indeed, the digitalmediaworld article seems to suggest that the SDR grade came first and then it was handed off to Dolby for the HDR pass, with the filmmakers keeping an eye on their SDR grade using mock HDR tests to make sure that they weren't "clamping" down any highlights before it was passed onwards) but the HDR luminance is absolutely essential to making the colour volume seem as wide as it is. When the two are combined the effect is extraordinary, and yet even when viewed in a pitch-dark room on a calibrated ZD9 I never felt that my face was melting off. Huh.
In terms of dat dreaded banding (which can be such a bugaboo for CG animated stuff) I only spotted a few wisps of it in the smoke during the Phantom Zone sequence when Joker first gets sent there. Other than that this encode copes with it like a champ, aided immeasurably by the layer of "grain" which helps to dither out the colour gradations. I didn't take a photo of the above shot just because it looks cool, I also did it because there's zero banding in that tricky blue sky behind Batman.
Wow, wow and thrice wow. My pulse is actually quickening just typing this up, or perhaps that's just the bacon sandwich I had for lunch. In any case, this is a magnificent example of what HDR can do. Forget DV, HDR10, HDR10+, HLG, VP9, 2084, 2086, 2094, static, dynamic, and whatever other technical shit we all like to b*tch about: when it looks THIS magnificent I don't give a good goddamn.
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