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')."

and this is going to catch on how?

So exactly how are HD videos (blu-ray, or HD) going to capture the hearts and imaginations of the buying public with this kind of debut? Ostensibly (you would think) the best and brightest would be selected for their ability to shine and put the best face on an already murky new format battle.

It's an interesting task, convincing Mom and Dad, friends, etc., this is the latest and greatest thing... "no, no, just wait, you'll SEE the difference in the next scene... just let me pause it on this one frame, THERE!... see how clear the pattern is on Drew Barrymore's shirt!"

I've seen HD from comcast. I've seen HD demo'ed in Circuit City (when they FINALLY got some source). My experience and subjective opinion is that what is being delivered is being delivered with unacceptable compromise, whether it be to rush to market, or just shoddy quality, it doesn't matter. I've seen compression artifacts, I've seen jittery playback. I'm not "getting" it.

This kind of rollout will underwhelm the public, especially at the rollout prices. The only thing keeping this from dying on the vine is the digital mandate to convert to digital, and the tide of HDTVs only requiring customers to buy in.

Re:and this is going to catch on how?

Partly it's rushed, yes. But there's also the fact that HD has been so hyped, especially the next generation of media players, that nothing will really blow away viewers short of being able to reach into the screen and feel Drew Barrymore up.

And even then, I don't think that would be worth the outlay of cash for the hardware.

Re:and this is going to catch on how?

The problems are almost always in the source material.

Hell, TNTHD upconvertes and stretches (!) normal SD content for most of the day and calls it "HD".

I've noticed that the most important part of HDTV is the source, and this is evident just through simple channel surfing. Shows that I assume can afford better cameras because they need less of them, and less mobile ones, such as Jay Leno/David Letterman, SNL, etc, have absolutely amazing quality. Watching it on a 1080p 50 inch Sony SXRD is phenomenal, with no artifacts, or lack of detail. The colors, contrast, and image quality is so good that it appears your looking through a window.

Anyone who has seen this TV displaying true HD content at my apartment is immediately excited. And almost everyone says "oh oh! put in a DVD so we can see how that looks", unaware that DVDs are of a much lower resolution.

So I put one in, usually something fun like The Matrix or what have you, with a warning that it's going to look much worse then what they just saw. I have a pretty good upconverting DVD playing that puts out 1080i/60 over HDMI. Looks better than a normal DVD player but considerably worse than the HD content. Everyone so far has been disappointed with DVD quality (except my mom, but she's ...well...a mom).

Point is, there *IS* a difference, a huge difference, and those of us with good TVs are begging for a way to watch our movies in the same detail we watch our TV...other than HBOHD.

Re:and this is going to catch on how?

As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.

xxx

> http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/xxx.html [highdefdigest.com]

you gotta wonder how many porn filters will block that third link...

How many of these were shot on digital?

Seriously, 5th Element was shot on film, and the other two I don't know about, but aren't there any well-known digital productions which would transfer cleanly? How pristine are the masters for 5th Element by now?

And to agree with the earlier poster: 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.

Re:How many of these were shot on digital?

No joke. You'd think they'd dig up some killer app for this stuff, but instead we get a substandard action movie, a junky Drew Barrymore chick flick, and cult French scifi flick (which I personally love, but which isn't exactly a must-upgrade title for Joe Sixpack.) Why wouldn't they use some Criterion-level classic that's available on high-quality masters, and that everyone wants? Doesn't anyone else remember how many VCRs were sold by "E.T." in the 1980s?

ET was a poor sales alien

I don't think ET sold that many VCRs. The poor little guy had a slow distribution system (kids and their bikes--granted they could fly, but still, those bike baskets don't hold many VCRs, plus ET could have stayed on the office and have left more space for the VCRs, BUT then the bikes couldn't fly then could they?). Anyway, he also was more concerned with constantly trying to report into his home sales office rather than focusing on customer satisfaction. Why the "competition" was so concerned with catching him is beyond me. The only thing he had was the "light finger promotion" deal and the claims that his prices didn't "Ouch".

Re:How many of these were shot on digital?

And to agree with the earlier poster: 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.

A relevant Penny Arcade comic to answer your question:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/19 [penny-arcade.com]

Re:How many of these were shot on digital?

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.

Film should be fine as a source

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.

Uh...

close just looks like a messed-up bunch of dots

Well... that's sort of what it is, yes? :-\

Warning: reviewer does not understand technology

From the 50 dates review:

Happily, this transfer proves that the Blu-ray format can deliver a picture as good as anything I've seen yet on HD DVD.

This is a nonsensical statement. There is nothing to prove. They both support the exact same compression formats (MPEG-2, VC-1 and the best of them all: H.264/AVC). The maximum bitrates are high enough to not cause noticeable artifacts in either format, when AVC is used with a good encoder. Both formats support storing the movies in 1080p24 and pull-downed to 1080i60 at runtime. Therefore, there can not be any quality difference inherent to the formats, only errors caused by external factors such as scratched discs. Blu-ray comes ahead in this case, because it has stupendously good hard coating technology by TDK.

Coming Soon...

We can expect Blu Ray releases of Istar and Gigli any day now. Actually, a quick Google shows that the real problem may be that the Sony movie catalog is almost completely dreck, Princess Bride excepted. If what Sony owns is crap, crap is what will be released first on Blu Ray.

Reviewers are Idiots

I find it very hard to stomach these reviewers who are trying to compare the 'picture quality' of Blu-Ray to HD-DVD when the codecs used are exactly the same. Blu-Ray offers the edge on size and maximum bitrate, but it's doubtful that the early titles are going to be taking advantage of it. Any title that did take advantage of the extra space would very logically look better (if the compressionist is not an idiot, anyway). Whether or not anyone would really notice is another debate. You could make a comparison to the acutal players ability to decode and post process the footage as well, but this would require identical MPEG2 or H.264 content to be fed through both format players -- which has not been done either.

So anyway, I guess the gauntlet is down and the proverbial "masses" will decide. Unfortunately they will probably end up doing it based on title availability, brand loyalty, price, and "picture quality" instead of technical merit. All it really means to me is that I have to wait to buy a player until: a) one camp gives in, b) someone makes a dual format player or c) companies start releasing *everything* in both formats.

Re:Reviewers are Idiots

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?

Surprise! It's easy to render talking heads

Somewhat surprisingly, it's '50 First Dates' that ranked highest of the three in video quality

Not surprising, there's no action to speak of, not a lot of motion, etc.. Less movement means less to encode, which means less work to decode.

The Matrix was always the DVD stress-tester of choice, specifically the kung fu scene, because you would really notice the quality of the decoder during the more intense scenes, where every pixel on screen is changing with every frame.

So my question is, is this an issue with the encoding of the discs or an inherent design problem with the discs themselves, perhaps too low a bitrate, or just a cheap shit decoder in the playback device? My money is on the latter.

Maybe film transfer to compressed HDTV won't work.

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

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:its nothing like the jump from vhs - dvd

(probably when Netflix chooses a technology)

Actually, Netflix is already offering HD-DVD disks. All you have to do is set it up in your account settings.

Most people don't know this

Most people don't know this but the quality of current Blu-ray titles does not match the quality offered by HD-DVD's for a very simple reason. The couple of Blu-ray titles that have been released so far are all encoded using MPEG-2, while HD-DVD titles are using the more advanced MPEG-4 based VC1 codec.

What is even more frustrating is that Blu-ray titles could have been VC1 encoded. The Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards both support the same set of video codecs. But for some reason the Blu-ray camp decided to encode the first titles using MPEG-2. I don't follow closely enough the format war to know why such a decision has been taken, but I know this is a stupid decision because most non-technical people will have a bad first impression of Blu-ray. It is even more frustrating knowing that Blu-ray titles have the technical potential to look at least as good as HD-DVD titles.

Independent Review

Another reivew, from a Mr. Sony McSonyson, informed me that Blu-Ray provides not only a superior picture quality, but also interfaces directly with my brain to extract my personal preferences. For example, in Star Wars, regardless of which version, Han would always shoot first. In every scene. Also, "Into the Blue" would focus on Jessica Alba not in the ocean, but a kiddie pool filled with baby oil. Also, it was revealed that HD-DVD would kill my dog, leave me sterile, and emit cancer-inducing radiation if viewed for more than 0.18 seconds at a time.

Re:Interesting Choices for First Releases

The executives of the major entertainment conglomerates sit around a large table, cigars in hand...

Disney Rep: How can we get "Ice Diver" to see 50 First Dates?

Sony Pictures Rep: I have an idea! We'll invent a new high definition DVD format and release only 50 First Dates.

Disney Rep: Great idea! If that won't get him to see it, nothing will!
 

Re:And why?

He said: "Why not something good, oh, say the first Harry Potter Movie. The Battlestar Galactica Mini-Series (not the tv series). Star Wars? T3?"

We heard: "Nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd. Nerd. Nerd?"

Thou speaks too soon (was:$499 PS3 Here We Come)

Thank god for the death of the image constraint token!

Image constraint token is enabled by content; for the playback devices to be certified, they are required to support it. The content providers at this point has decided not to rape consum... (ahm) enable it does not preclude it from being enabled at a later date.