First Blu-ray Disc Reviews Posted Online

An anonymous reader writes "With the first Blu-ray player and discs officially making their market debuts tomorrow, High-Def DVD Digest has posted the first reviews of three of the first Blu-ray discs -- The Fifth Element, 50 First Dates, and xXx. So what's the verdict? So far, in terms of video quality, the results seem to be mixed: standard DVD fave 'Fifth Element' underwhelmed ('just not the best HD I've seen'); likewise, 'xXx,' was a disappointment ('up close just looks like a messed-up bunch of dots'). Somewhat surprisingly, it's '50 First Dates' that ranked highest of the three in video quality ('holds its own with the best high-definition transfers out there')."

Comments

$499 PS3 Here We Come

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god for the death of the image constraint token!

$499 PS3, component cables, 1080p set, BluRay movies...yeah baby!

Interesting Choices for First Releases

[IceDiver]

I didn't see these in the theatre, I didn't rent them when they came out on DVD, and I CERTAINLY don't want them in my permanent collection.

What makes Hollywood think I'm going to want them now, just because they are high def?

This post seems biased

[Aellus]

The 5th Element review that the news post referenced paints an entirely different picture than "it completely underwhelmed". The review says it was still a damn good picture, it just literally was NOT the best HD could be. That can easily be explained since the original was film, not digital. Other than that? Its still HD, which is a whole lot better than standard definition. I havent read the other two reviews yet, but it doesnt seem like Blu-Ray really flopped like this post makes it sound like it did...

Re:This post seems biased

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, standard 35mm film supports a higher resolution than "modern" digital cameras. The way I understood it was that film lacks the discrete pixels and therefore can scale much better than any rasterized source. Should we ever move to a High High Definition standard in the future, movies shot digitally aren't going to upscale as well as traditional film has from VHS to HD. Personally, I think larger film would be the way to go.

Then again, I've been pretty disappointed with image quality post VHS. We traded a pretty good medium, all things considered, with a less defined image for near-instant coasters that artifact like crazy if they even work in your player. It's ridiculous and, what with digital cable and the early reviews of HD/BR, it looks like we're in for more of the same with worse lock-in and an even higher price :/

Re:and this is going to catch on how?

[baadger]

"I've noticed that the most important part of HDTV is the source"

This goes for all video. Period. If you visit a digital video enthusiast forum like Doom9 you'll see that statement over and over and over in threads. As the first post said, move along nothing to see here.

Re:How many of these were shot on digital?

[WillAffleckUW]

Whoever's greenlighting chick films like "50 first dates" and "Phantom of the Opera" for testdriving a new medium needs a new job, preferably selling hot dogs on a street corner, to get an idea of what a market actually asks for.

Well, I actually watched Phantom of the Opera at the movies on the big screen, and I think that they're aiming for the Opera and Cinema buffs with that one - a lot of early HDTV adopters are into opera for some reason, have the sound systems to appreciate it, and might want to get it in a higher resolution format.

It won a number of awards for cinematography, with good reason.

Plus, the blood, burns, and mask are just plain cool.

Maybe film transfer to compressed HDTV won't work.

[Animats]

There may be a big problem looming for Hollywood. If you transfer 35MM film to 1080p, the film grain often shows up. Compressing all that useless film grain noise, which has no frame to frame coherence, will use up a big fraction of the data capacity. It will also mess up the motion compression, which usually results in annoying jaggies. So it's probably necessary to filter out at least some of the film grain. But if you filter out the film grain, you lose resolution.

The reviews of the new Blu-ray disks ("the picture looks too soft and flat") indicates that there's probably too much filtering.

Somewhere in LA, there are probably members of SMTPE struggling with this, trying to figure out the right tradeoffs between resolution loss and compression overload when converting existing films.

its nothing like the jump from vhs - dvd

[asv108]

The first DVD player I had was a kit from Creative, which came with this huge decoder card in order to handle playback on the computers of the age. ( 12/1997)

In a period of 2 years DVD went from geek toy(97) to mass market adoption(99). Fueled by the features, quality, price, and convenience of the discs. The falling prices of the hardware players helped a lot too.

I'm a early adopter with an HD setup, but I have no interest in Blue-Ray or HD-DVD at the moment. I'm sure in a couple years I will pick one (probably when Netflix chooses a technology), but right now regular DVD's using an upconverting 1080i DVD player and an HDMI cable look and sound great for me. The upconverting setup was only $250 a year ago, and it makes my existing DVD's look great.

What is the motivation for these HD formats from a user perspective? Higher priced players, high priced discs, and limited selection. What is the consumer paying for? A little bit better pictured quality is not going to motivate people to switch.

There needs to be something more for the average consumer to consider using any of these formats. Looking at the audio world, there have been hi-def audio formats out for quite some time with little success. There needs to be something more besides a quality increase to get people to jump ship.

Re:Reviewers are Idiots

[stratjakt]

Unless it's from Sony and specifically a BluRay showcase disc, I'd imagine the HD-DVD and BluRay releases will be exactly the same data - after all, why encode and remaster the thing twice?

The masses though can't get over the Beta vs VHS thing.. So the non-techies out there can't grasp that this time around the only difference is the discs themselves, and the markets being split for no reason better than competition for the sake of it.

I think HDDVD vs Blu Ray is a battle that everybody will ultimately lose.

I know severeal folks with fancy new HDTV plasmas, and most don't get why they should pay a few extra bucks for component video cables, when s-video or composite looks just as good to them... Frankly, unless you're a videophile, they're right.

If I'm just passively watching or playing a game, I can't see the difference between progressive scan and interlaced..

Maybe I'm just getting to old -- but most people are as old or older. I don't see the point.

I feel the same way about XBox 360, PS3 and Wii.. They aren't a "new generation", the whole thing seems to be the industry trying to force us to upgrade to something we don't want or need. The last generation was "good enough", and once the market got saturated, they conductor of the gravy train yelled "end of the line" and they freaked out..

What were we talking about anyways?

Re:Maybe film transfer to compressed HDTV won't wo

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already a solution to this although I haven't seen any reviews of it. Thomson has FGT (film-grain technology). They actually analyze the film grain in each frame, filter it, and then regenerate it at playback time (after decompression) using coefficients from when they initially measured it. Supposedly you get better compression and mostly-accurate film grain.

Film should be fine as a source

[Sycraft-fu]

Quality 35mm shot on a good lense, as you get with hollywood movies, is good to somewhere in the realm of 2000-6000 lines of resolution each direction. That's a ball park, of course, since there's no direct correlation to pixels on analogue film, but still. A good negative can resolve about 6000 lines of resolution, the positive shown in theatres is good for about 2000.

35mm has plenty of resolution for a good HD, it just takes doing a good digital transfer. If you want to see an example, get the T2 Extreme Edition DVD and watch it on a modern computer running Windows. The 2nd disc has a HD transfer in WMV9 (VC1) format. They chose an intermediary resolution that's not part of the ATSC spec, 1440 horizontal (the verticle is cropped to fit the aspect ratio of the film). Because the bitrate is only that of DVD, it gets a bit blocky during action sequences but for all that the detail is superb. It is clearly head and shoulders about the DVD version, despite being sourced from film, and an old one at that.

While pure digital movies certianly are easier to get good copies of, since there's no transfer just resampling, it's not that film lacks the rez, it is just that they don't want to invest the time and money in to a good transfer.

Re:Warning: reviewer does not understand technolog

[thule]

In one of his articles he notes that they're still only using MPEG-2, not the other, better codecs. This could easily account for the lack of quality.

Better in comparison to what? MPEG2 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 is still used for studio and satellite. The shows you see on HD sets were high data rate MPEG2 4:2:2 coming over the satellite and later downconverted to 4:2:0 for 8VSB transmission. HBO-HD is MPEG2 on C-Band. It seems to me given a high enough bitrate, MPEG2 will look the same, if not better, as MPEG4 AVC. MPEG4 AVC is "better" because good quality video can be had at a lower bitrate.

I would imaging that since broadcast TV is all MPEG2 based, studios will be using MPEG2 for some time to come. Only consumer satellite companies like DirecTV and Dishnet are using MPEG4 for broadcasting HD. The reason is they want to maximize their bandwidth and still get a decent picture. If you want the "best" picture a person would want to get the network MPEG2 feeds off C-Band.