Official Blu-ray Thread

Weird, all of the TV ads I've seen for the last two weeks haven't said anything about a blu-ray; unlike every other DVD ad I've seen.
 
I just want George Lucas to stop being a tool and always being the last adopter of a new format... I want my star wars on blu-ray. Hell, the DVD versions of Indiana Jones are only like 3-4 years old....
 
So my Planet of the Apes collection arrived. Watched the first one, awesomeness.

Word of warning, as awesome as the package is...

1) The original movie is the only movie that's really strong, the others are just plain not as good, and the first can function easily as a standalone. They are decent flicks tho, and the whole thing was $91.

2) The packaging is really elaborate but impractical. You can't just slip this on your DVD rack, it's about twice as wide as a DVD case if not three times. Now I have to store it specially above my rack, which is doable but I'd have saved that space for something truly amazing like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.


I also got Futurama: Bender's Game. It looks as good as it possibly could look, I'd say on par with the Simpsons Movie release. I liked it more than A Beast with a Billion Backs, which was pretty meh. The intro mixes in the Futurama theme music with what I believe is a version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which is one of my favorite songs.
 
Grabbed Kung-Fu panda the other day, and going to get Hellboy 2 on tuesday. When does Wanted and hancock come out? I never got a chance to see either of those but I wanted to.
 
Dunno Wanted, Hancock is already out at Best Buy at least.

I got the Band of Brothers and Firefly sets today. If you order on Amazon, they're under $60 each. Which for the amount of hours you're getting it a pretty damn good deal. Was Band of Brothers even broadcast in high def when it originally aired? It was probably too long ago. I missed it on TV but I absolutely love Saving Private Ryan so this should be up the same alley.

Firefly really makes me yearn for Star Trek: TNG to get a blu-ray release. I got a little inside info on it, and Paramount isn't happy with the costs right now, they are not sure what the Star Trek franchise is worth, so they're gonna see how well the movie does. I hope it does great. I could really go for a new series of TNG quality...
 
Band of Brothers is definitely a great release. Pretty much a must have. Yes, there is a lot of grain, especially in the really dark scenes. It's because it's very detailed and was shot on film. If they smooth out the grain, that means they're also smoothing out detail, so believe me, it's a good thing. The sound is amazing and the packaging is the best I've seen yet. It's a metal tin, but it's shaped well to fit in on a DVD rack, like the size of 5 blu rays next to each other.

Anyone else pick this up, or Firefly?

Firefly is averagish, some scenes look great, some so-so. It's probably the best that can be done with the show. If you're a fan, I'd say go ahead and buy it. Don't buy it to try and make some sort of point to the studios though, it's not coming back.
 
I grabbed Wall-e, Hancock and Tropic Thunder today. Might get Wanted next tuesday, and I'm definitely going to get Dark Knight on the 9th.
 
Kingdom of Heaven still wows me with its visual qualities.

I have several movies that I still want to get but I am waiting to find them <$20.
Hancock
Tropic Thunder
There Will Be Blood

Dark Knight will be mine on day one.
 
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Current Blu-ray I own:

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Hellboy
UltraViolet
Underworld Evolution

Disks I mainly bought to see how much better Blu-ray would be.

Personal Findings, it looks better then DVD, but only on a HDTV, the sound is also notably better if you have a good soundset but for the moment I am not convinced Blu Ray is worth the 10 Euros more per disk.
Perhaps only for titles like the Dark knight for now.
 
Shirai said:
Personal Findings, it looks better then DVD, but only on a HDTV, the sound is also notably better if you have a good soundset but for the moment I am not convinced Blu Ray is worth the 10 Euros more per disk.
Perhaps only for titles like the Dark knight for now.
Click to expand...
I thought everyone already knew that. Blu-ray is only worth it if you have a home theater that can take advantage of what it has to offer. If you don't have an HDtv and aren't looking to get one very soon, don't waste your money.
 
My current Blu-Ray list is pretty small too, but with time it'll eventually get bigger. I do wish the price of Blu-Ray discs would drop.. at least a little bit, like $5 or so.

I only have:
Heroes Season 2
Batman: Gotham Knight
Iron Man
Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Star Wars: Clone Wars

The sound is definitely a step up from normal dvds as it seems more crisp. Also I think Blu-Ray discs tend to pack a lot more extra content than normal dvds. I believe some even have the option of obtaining more content via download, but I could be wrong about that.
 
Bajaratt said:
I thought everyone already knew that. Blu-ray is only worth it if you have a home theater that can take advantage of what it has to offer. If you don't have an HDtv and aren't looking to get one very soon, don't waste your money.
Click to expand...

But I do D:
And honestly for most movies, I'm not going to spend €25 for a Blu-ray when the DVD is half that.
Or it has to be a pretty damn good movie.

I may be able to afford it, but I'm still dutch.
 
25 Euros for a blu-ray? Wow, you guys are getting raped hard core, they're only 25-30 dollars here; and that'd be about 15 euros last I checked.

I can understand your position, I'm only buying new movies on blu-ray. I'm not paying extra to get pretty much the same quality picture, only having it pre-upscaled rather than my player doing it.

One big selling point for me to throw in the few extra bucks has been the free digital copy version that comes with the blu-rays. I'll buy the blu-ray for myself, and give the digial copy to my parents, who mainly watch movies on their ipod rather than on their TV's.
 
I don't think many blu-rays are just upscaled standard def content. I've got nearly 100 and I don't think any of mine are. They are mostly re-encoded 4k transfers from the original films. Even the animated stuff, like the Simpsons, Futurama and Sleepy Beauty is in honest High Def.

Pretty much anything can be put in high def, studios always save the original negatives. The only question is animated stuff that was then filmed digitally. It has to be re-encoded off the original cells, and those cells have to have been preserved. Also some live action stuff is filmed with digital cameras in standard definition. This is content from a specific time frame where digital cameras made more sense than film but high def was too expensive.
 
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Until they started recording in high definition, everything was being recorded in standard definition; therefore they're doing some form of upscaling to improve the image to get it to HD. The more recent movies upscale much better, but movies from 10+ years ago aren't going to get much more than an upscaler will provide.

Yeah, they can put anything in high definition, but the thing is that older content won't get much of an improvement, because there's not as much detail present in the original film as there is today. To get it in HD, they're going to "re-master" the video, but the process is basically just going to be the same process as upscaling; adding in extra pixels based on the original pixels of information.

The movies do look good, maybe a little better than the upscaling a normal DVD, but definitely not by enough to convince me to shell out another $30 for the same movie.
 
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