Twentieth Century Fox is releasing its first batch of Bond Blu-ray discs in Australia on 12 November 2008. These are:
- Dr. No (1962) (the first 007, with Sean Connery)
- From Russia With Love (1963)
- Thunderball (1965)
- Live and Let Die (1973) (Roger Moore’s first one)
- For Your Eyes Only (1981)
- Die Another Day (2002) (Pierce Brosnan’s last one)
I’ve already watched the first two and the picture quality is brilliant. Dr. No, for example, was derived from the original negative and then put through the Lowry process, which takes a 4K (4,096 pixel wide) digital scan for the source and then applies an enormous amount of digital image restoration through hundreds of networked computers and hundreds of terabytes of storage.
Anyway, you can judge the results for yourself with my Blu-ray/DVD comparison here. Here’s a taste, with Ursula Andress’ famous entrance:
The original Australian PAL DVD to the left, the new Blu-ray to the right. Note: there is considerable cropping of the DVD source, so I haven’t blown this up quite as much as I normally would. In increased it to 1,801 pixels wide, rather than the usual 1,920.