Bill Hunt speaks to an avs member about Sony/BD

[Deciazulado]

The Fifth Element - I've actually seen a side-by-side comparison of the Blu-ray Disc and the original D4 master tape. They're very close in terms of quality. VERY close. So the issues that people have with that Blu-ray Disc are actually with the quality of the original high-def master (which was apparently the best that the studio could get from director Luc Besson)

Since the specs of dirt that I saw on that disc transfer were black, the original film element used for that transfer was either the interpositive (2nd generation) or a print (4th generation) and not the original negative so a transfer from the original element will look much better (Interpositives have normally half the resolution (1/4 the data) of an original negative, for example).

In any case I saw TFE disc displayed optimally on a 768p display (570 x 1366 effective image resolution) and it looked fairly well compared to a 35mm average theatrical projection. A 1080p transfer (804 x 1920 effective image resolution) redone from the original Super35 negative would probably surpass the average theater presentation easily if done correctly