Picture: TBA Sound: TBA Extras: Nil
Movie: Picture: TBA Sound: TBA Extras: Nil
(Australian rating); Region Free
The following video bitrate graph was generated by BDInfo 0.5.2:
In the following examples, at the top of each is the full frame (suitably shrunk down) used in the comparison, with a 250 pixel wide detail from the frame underneath. The left side is from the PAL DVD. The image was captured digitally from the disc (using VideoReDo Plus), scaled up from its native 720 by 576 resolution to 1,024 by 576 (to present in the 16:9 aspect ratio), and then, in order to be comparable to the Blu-ray version, from that to 1,920 by 1,080. The detail is from that last scaled version, and has not been rescaled again. The right side is from the Australian Blu-ray (captured using the command-line media player MPplayer). This has not been scaled at all.
Since different applications were used to capture the two frames, I am not normally comfortable comparing the brightness or colour between the two. For those visitors from NTSC lands, generally PAL DVDs are just a touch sharper than NTSC DVDs.
It seems to me that razor sharp focus was not an outcome high on the priority list for the movie makers. At no point in the movie does it reach above about average in sharpness and clarity. Nonetheless, there are improvements yielded by the Blu-ray, such as the elimination of MPEG2 noise artefacts around the lettering here:
Look at the door handle and you can see the increased coherence of the Blu-ray:
This shot shows that the Blu-ray is delivering about all the detail and sharpness that is available. Even so, Arnie seems out of focus, but still you can see wrinkles and shadows on his coat which are just invisible on the DVD:
Blu-ray gives readable text, DVD doesn't:
On this scene, the MPEG2 artefacts and loss of detail in the DVD are made worse by macro blocking, none of which troubles the Blu-ray:
