Question for all blu-ray supporters

[Deciazulado]

Originally Posted by DrSyn

Well I'm glad I returned HOFD before I opened it. And I bought Terminator and even though I only watched the first 5 minutes, I thought the quality was DVD quality. Perhaps I should steer clear of older movies on Blu-Ray.
Another thing that frustrates me is that when I go to Best Buy near me, the titles available for Blu-Ray varies greatly from store to store. And the HD DVD's seem to be stocked, titles and quantity. Now I'm a Blu-Ray, PS3 guy all the way. But it does suck seeing Batman Begins and other titles on HD DVD and not Blu-Ray

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Maybe it's me but does anyone else have The Terminator? What does everyone else think about the quality?

Just a note. I haven't watched Terminator but I've seen snippets of T2. T2 starts with night shots, which are done with more sensitive film (higher ASA/grain) Well it seems like the grain was blurred on those shots for this transfer, but then we get to the first close-up to the T-1000 inside the police car (probably shot in a studio) and suddenly it's very sharp and for the rest of the movie for example all daylight scenes are sharp and clean. So if you watch the first few minutes of T2 you might think "mmm doesn't look High Def enough", while what seems to be happening is that for high grain nighttime shots specially at the beginning they smoothed over the grain so non-film people wouldn't scream "noisy!". The Fifth Element's title sequence looks like it was done from a soft dupe element. Then we get to the shot of the boy with the camel and it's almost like going from 16mm to a 35mm theatrical print. etc. Young Guns also has a softish title sequence, that when the white titles end, the image becomes better.

The other thing I want to mention is, 1080 has fine details that get lost when you watch on a 720p, or when you watch at seating distances like 4+ picture heights, which are better suited for SD. Ultraviolet on 1080p at 4 PH looks kinda soft because the cinematography has filtered (smoothed) the medium/low frequencies while leaving the high frequencies intact, but that fine detail starts to be at the limit of your vision. You enlarge the 1080p picture to the movie size it was designed for and suddenly you start seeing sharp eyelashes and edges that your eye now can focus on. All these factors might affect perception of image quality.

I've just seen some direct captures from the Batman disc on another video site, and as example, I think T2 looks better than that on a 1080p screen, etc.