Fear and Desire 4K UHD (1952)

[StarFuryG7]

Originally Posted by asacmurr

The actual restoration and age of the film isn't the problem. It's the hideous encode / compression job.

I totally got that -- my point was that I went into purchasing it with limited expectations to start with. I wasn't expecting a brilliant 4K remastering of Citizen Kane by any stretch of imagination.

[nicwood]

Originally Posted by StarFuryG7

I checked them out on a handheld late last night just before going lights out, and then gave them another look on one of my work monitors today after posting this morning. Not very impressive, but I also take into account when this film was made, along with the fact that it was basically almost a student film apparently. That being the case, there's only so much one should expect from a film of this type. However, there's no excuse for a lousy job on the part of the company refurbishing and releasing it in the here and now. But the package is here -- it arrived just after 6pm, and the situation is what it is at this point.

The Home Theater Forum review that I linked to here did give it a 4.5 out of 5 rating on the video quality, though. So between what you've put out there and their review, it is a little perplexing.

I also bought the initial KL Set of Columbo recently. Have you posted anything about that release? It's not 4K, just standard Blu-ray, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it.

I don't want to come off as arrogant but I'm right with what I showed in my posts about the films. The "pro" reviewers claiming something else have no idea what they're talking about in this particular case. The issues are there and they're all due to Kino Lorber screwing up. Without a doubt, they ruined these films. You're correct that these are all student films which could never compete with Citizen Kane filmmaking-wise, that's for sure, but lacking budget and production value didn't render this release horrible. In fact, with a competent disc encoding job, the Kubrick films could have looked better in 4K than Citizen Kane. A main reason is that for the Kubrick films, the original negatives were largely available, which is beneficial for an extra notch in resolution gain (Citizen Kane sadly isn't graced with this), and since the films are all relatively short, they could've been encoded beautifully in order to showcase essentially a copy of what the newly created, "uncompressed" 4K DI's look like. Fear and Desire could've been a win-win situation for everybody. This is 1000% only on KL and their authoring house.

I don't have the Columbo sets unfortunately and don't plan on getting them. Sorry

[thatguamguy]

Originally Posted by nicwood

Kino doesn't care. Much to the contrary, they laugh about posts like the one I made. It's also useless because of people like this that are either unwilling or incapable of acknowledging that KL feeds us products that are made with the least amount of effort:

The fact that KLI posts on the site has somehow given people the idea that they have to defend everything Kino releases, no matter how bad they screw up. People will actually claim that the "Columbo: The Return" episodes don't crop anything important, despite the photographic evidence to the contrary. It's a sad little echo chamber in that thread.

[Kyle15]

"Let people enjoy things!" "Who cares!" they'll screech while routinely calling names and other stuff they do not like 'garbage' etc. It's so old at this point and it's leeched into so many crevices I don't know when we'll get the stink out.

[grahams76]

Originally Posted by thatguamguy

The fact that KLI posts on the site has somehow given people the idea that they have to defend everything Kino releases, no matter how bad they screw up. People will actually claim that the "Columbo: The Return" episodes don't crop anything important, despite the photographic evidence to the contrary. It's a sad little echo chamber in that thread.

Right. The forum is also being used by Kino as a free and effective promotion tool - which is fine, but that cuts both ways.