Picture: 
Sound: Extras:
Chicago
Movie: Picture: Sound: Extras:
When the discs arrived, three of them turned out to have region codes, even though the oldest of these was released way back in 2004. Fortunately the fourth disc, Chicago, was region free. When prices fall a bit more I shall purchase a US Blu-ray player, eliminating the region coding issue. In the meantime, if you're contemplating purchasing a Blu-ray disc from America, consult bluray.liesinc.net to ensure that the disc is region free. Generally, Warner Bros are region free, Fox and Buena Vista aren't.
Chicago is, though, a BV release. It's a musical, of course, transplanted from Broadway, but with a new vision attached by Rob Marshall. The fantasy musical sections and the more-or-less real scenes are sharply intercut, each completing the story for the other. The thing even manages to pull of a surprise ending.
A music deserves fine sound, and this disc receives it.
Occasionally in various sections of the Internet you see quite vociferous arguments about which is better: Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio or Linear PCM. Let us dispose of this right now: all else being equal (ie. bitrate and sampling frequency) there is no difference between them. Dolby and DTS-HD tracks are lossless compression systems. That is, they allow the original PCM to be fully reconstituted with no loss of quality.
In practice, for many people LPCM is best. The reason is that any and every home theatre receiver capable of accepting audio over HDMI will work with this, whereas many equipment combinations cannot fully use Dolby TrueHD nor, more commonly, DTS-HD.
This disc goes with Linear PCM, 5.1 channels of it. Rather than the usual 16 bit, 48kHz version, it gets 24 bits. The total bitrate for this English track alone is 6,912kbps, or slightly more than the average video bitrate for the Australian DVD version of 'Chicago'. And that's not counting the other four audio tracks.
A word of caution: the disc defaults to the 640kbps Dolby Digital version. You will have to explicitly select the LPCM track to get the best quality. The picture is a superb MPEG4 AVC encode which captures the film - grain in the dark scenes and all. Beautiful.
There is one advantage of buying Blu-ray from America. Most of its discs come in 10mm thick boxes, instead of our 15mm ones. That means you can fit 50% more discs on your shelves.
Here we see the increased background detail, specifically the top right corner of the door behind the actress:
The quality of this movie's transfer to Blu-ray seems from some of these screen shots to be limited by film grain.
Blu-ray also manages to banish that edge echo afflicting the DVD. On a closer look, it doesn't really banish it, but does narrow and soften it. Why is it that this effect seems to be predominately to left of the foreground objects, rather than to their right. Does the compression system scan from one side to the other?
Still, the detail and increase in sharpness (see the hair) is welcome:
And the Blu-ray allows you see that the lamp shades are actually patterned:
