I don't get it: (The Sentinel)

[BTBuck1]

Chad, maybe you can enlighten us...

Highdefdigest gives this like 2 1/2 stars,

Hometheatrespot says it's near reference at 4 1/2 paws..

what gives?

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/sentinel2006.html

http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsth...?sequence=1848

[Deciazulado]

Well the main complaint hd digest has is about the "look" of the film or the contrasts (I guess he is refering to the middle greys, as he seems to say the blacks are excellent and the whites bloom) not being bright enough for him. Maybe a gamma curve boost would have been more to his liking.

[KenThompson]

There does seem to be a difference of opinion. A newer title so one would expect it to look good, there was also a difference in their evaluation of Planet of the Apes. I'll trust Chad

[DavePS3]

One of the best I've seen on BD is definately Behind Enemy Lines. That film looked great to begin with and the Blu version is as good as Kingdom of Heaven in terms of detail, depth of field and color accuracy.

[JTK]

Originally Posted by KenThompson

There does seem to be a difference of opinion. A newer title so one would expect it to look good, there was also a difference in their evaluation of Planet of the Apes. I'll trust Chad

I'll trust Chad everytime without exception, over just about anyone else, when it comes to BD reviews.

[Longshot]

Originally Posted by JTK

I'll trust Chad everytime without exception, over just about anyone else, when it comes to BD reviews.

Exactly. Chad's the the best. Peter Bracke and Josh Z are absolutely awful and incredibly biased.

[dialog_gvf]

Originally Posted by BTBuck1

Chad, maybe you can enlighten us...

Highdefdigest gives this like 2 1/2 stars,

Hometheatrespot says it's near reference at 4 1/2 paws..

what gives?

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/sentinel2006.html

http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsth...?sequence=1848

One issue I've always had with Peter's reviews is he introduces complaints about the film look into the PQ rating. The PQ rating should reflect the quality of mastering and encoding, nothing else.

If the disc is transparent to the underlying film it deserves a high PQ score. Sure, reserve 5/5 for the top tier mastering + encoding efforts, but leave the complaints about the underlying film in the film's score.

I wonder if he be complaining about the washed out sepia tones of O Brother, Where Art Thou? "It lacks the colour pop we come to expect from HD".

[blitz6speed]

Originally Posted by Longshot

Exactly. Chad's the the best. Peter Bracke and Josh Z are absolutely awful and incredibly biased.

Josh Z is as worthless as it gets. The guy is so biased that he probably swears up and down everytime he sees a good transfer on BD. Pathetic.

[Chris Beveridge]

I just laughed at this review. Any complaints he has about how the film looks in terms of style and processing belongs squarely in the content portion of his review. Not in the video. The video is to reflect how the film is transfered, not how it was filmed in terms of post processing. I want to know if it's a clean and problem free transfer. Not that he hates that particular styling. Unfortunately, a good chunk of discs coming out on the BD side are like that since the HD DVD side seems to be favoring more "3D" films for whatever that means.

[ProvenFlipper]

I've come to trust Chad's reviews a lot more than Mr. Bracke. Peter always factors in things like overblown contrast and colors into the PQ score. If that's how the master looked, or how the director intended to look then that's what it needs to be based on. Who cares if post-production changed how the films colors looked if that's how it was meant to be. He should be rating the films on artifacts, detail and other factors indicative to the transfer, not the movie itself. He did the same thing to Talladega Nights.

[john_1958]

Originally Posted by Deciazulado

Well the main complaint hd digest has is about the "look" of the film or the contrasts (I guess he is refering to the middle greys, as he seems to say the blacks are excellent and the whites bloom) not being bright enough for him. Maybe a gamma curve boost would have been more to his liking.

what about hooking it up to computer
ever think hd digest have their tvs not configured right

[Chad Varnadore]

Thanks guys for the show of support. I'm sincerely honored. Unfortunately, it seems that some reviewers around the net review less to help studios and production houses refine their work, and try to give fans an idea of what to expect, than to appeal to what they percieve is popular opinion to boost site traffic or their own image. And, despite current trends and disc sales, it seems we haven't gotten past the months of mob-like mentality from outspoken HD DVD supporters on certain boards, encouraged by half-truths and in some cases outright lies from a very aggressive HD DVD promotion group, who seem to be targeting online markets rather than spending more money on advertising where it counts the most. And even many reviewers have bought into it, expectedly considering how little has been published about VC1 and AVC. Even MPEG2 offers a dramatic change in what we have come to know from DVD. So you can't blame people with even less study, believing what they're told from seemingly credible sources that in reality are more salesman than engineer.

That said, high def, is new to all of us. There is no reviewer online that has all the answers nor the experience with these new codecs, the masters they're derived from, and seeing films preserved this close to those masters to guarantee accuracy. For that reason, I do not like judging other reviewers. I'm sure most try to do the best they can with what they know and what their components allow them to see and hear. Some do seem to have bias that prevent objectivity. But I suspect it's less bias in most cases than flawed or incomplete perceptions of what is ideal or a perception that is being skewed by the components being used, which is why it's so crucial to try to know your equipment and the fundamentals of technologies like deinterlacing, color sampling, etc, something seemingly foreign to some that would rather focus on critiquing the movie itself, something even more subjective and potentially useless if not done with great understanding and insight behind a film, than studying the role of their components and grasping basic principles of acoustics, film, etc to try to do a better job at evaluating than just paying some ISF tech to do a quick grayscale and call that calibrated and assume it implies a measure of accuracy alone.

I haven't read Peter's review. And I'm honestly almost astonished to hear he gave the video a 2.5. But, to tell you the truth, I never found his evaluations very reliable when he was reviewing DVD either. Our systems have always been too far apart and frankly as long as he's been reviewing, I'm really surprised he doesn't seem to have picked up a better grasp of the hardware equation. His reviews are very well written though, and he does a high volume of reviewing that, combined with reporting news, if he has still has to work a full-time job to pay the bills like most of us, probably justifies cutting him a little slack here and there. That said, based on his equipment listing there are a number of holes that leave room for error in his setup in both audio and video without further elaboration on his part. I know his previous display couldn't optimally handle the material by its very design. Whether his new one does any better, I don't know. But, it doesn't appear that he's maximizing its potential if it can. And based on some of his HD/BD reviews that I have read, there seems to be something amis with his calibration as well. I suspect he could be feeding the display an inappropriate colorspace or it could be an issue with the displays color decoder itself. Based on remarks he's made pertaining to color fidelity on films in the past, he doesn't seem to be getting the full chroma resolution at least and probably not the full 1080x1920 resolution, despite using a 1080p display.

[BTBuck1]

Chad, great reply...pretty much sums up what we've all thought for a while.

Thanks for your input!

[hyperdine]

Awesome post. Glad we have a few experts like Chad around here!