The oldest comparison yet

Posted on February 15, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

I have just added a Blu-ray vs DVD comparsion of Casablanca, the oldest movie I’ve yet done (1942), here.

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Another 1080i50 movie

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Icon Film Distribution has kindly sent me another of its Blu-ray discs, the movie In Bruges. I’m pretty keen on watching this one since it scores a solid 8.1 on IMDB with 55,000+ votes. The disc is, like Miss Potter, encoded at 1080i50 rather than 1080p24, so it runs four or five minutes shorter than its original cinema timing. It shall also challenge most Blu-ray players. Now that I’ve been testing with Miss Potter, it has become clear that few players do a good job with this format.

Speaking of Miss Potter, she seems to be causing some US purchasers some headaches. On the Amazon.com product page there are, as I write, four customer reviews. The most recent one is from me warning that the disc may not play in some US Blu-ray players, despite it being all region, because of the 1080i50 encoding. As to the other reviews, here are some excerpts:

BUYER BEWARE!! This is the first Blu-ray disc which is supposed to play in regions A,B, and C, but it did not play on either one of my SONY Blu-ray players which have up to date firmwares. I believe the problem is that the standard and Hi-def content was encoded at 25 frames per second which is considered PAL, and will NOT play on U.S. Blu-ray players….

I have a regular DVD copy of it which, I suppose, will have to suffice, because my Blu-ray copy will not play on my Sony Blu-ray player. I even updated the firmware as suggested, but it did not help. I wish Amazon would post a disclaimer to this fact so that others will be spared the inconvenience of having to return unplayable copies. I have purchased many Blu-ray discs over the past six months, and this is the first one that I’ve had a problem with.

…

This release will not play on Sony PS3 (region A) DVD players.

Not only does Amazon fail to warn that the disc may not work in some US Blu-ray players, it incorrectly lists the format as NTSC. It also lists as ‘Studio’ a company which has explicitly told me that it does not import this disc to the US, yet when I tried to do an ‘Update Product Info’, my suggestion was robotically declined.

I’m still trying to find out from Icon why it has chosen this format for (now) at least two of its movies.

UPDATE (Friday, 13 February 2009, 5:57 pm): Icon also sent me Disaster Movie, which scores a dire 1.5 on IMDB, putting it at #17 in the bottom 100 movies of all time. I suspect that it will slide up a little from there, as it did produce the odd chuckle here and there. The video on this one is excellent 1080p24 … except for the copyright notice at the start, which is 1080i50. The ‘Icon’ logo at the start is 1080p24, but the main menu is 1080i50. All the little featurettes are also 1080i50.

Still, it’s Region B, so Americans won’t have to wrestle with it (as is In Bruges).

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Yay for Eastman Color!

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

My brother has drawn to my attention a truly fascinating article published (perhaps, republished) in the Journal of the National Film and Sound Archive, an Australian government body. Entitled ‘Crying in Color: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolor Died‘ (PDF).

In short, it explains how the introduction of the much derided Eastman Color film freed filmmakers from the tyranny, expense and technical limitations of the three strip Technicolor process. I had always thought that the near complete change from black and white to colour film during the 1950s was just another industry response to TV keeping audiences away. But it was in large part because Eastman Color was cheap.

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Shawshank moves up

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

As I mentioned the other day, Warner Bros is releasing The Shawshank Redemption on Blu-ray next month. A couple of days ago they sent me a sample. As it happens, it’s the US version in the US packaging, which we will not be getting. I expect that the disc will be identical.

This evening I added it to my DVD/Blu-ray database. Two of the fields therein are the IMDB ‘User Rating’, and the date on which I recorded it. User Rating was 9.2 as of this evening. Then I noticed my last entry for this movie (the DVD version) dated 4 May 2005. Back then the rating was 9.0, so it seems to have been voted up higher over the last 3.5 years.

I also got ahold of Dark City today, now also on Blu-ray. This has creeped from 7.6 to 7.8 pm IMDB over the last three years. Interesting to see fine movies achieving greater appreciation over time.

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More Bond Coming

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Yesterday Twentieth Century Fox sent me five more James Bond catalogue movie Blu-ray releases, adding to the half dozen released last year. These are due out on 18 March this year. They are:

I watched Goldfinger last night. Picture quality is brilliant.

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Finding Firmware Information

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

In my previous post I explained why it is important for me to report what firmware version is installed in some of the devices which I am reviewing. It occurs to me that consumer electronics manufacturers will need to come to terms with this as well.

At the moment, some still make it hard to find out what firmware version their products are using. For example, for the LG BD300 Blu-ray player you have to load a firmware update onto a memory stick and plug it in, whereupon the unit will inform you which firmware it is currently running. For the Panasonic DMP-BD35 you have to navigate to an unconnected setup menu item and then press the blue key on the remote control.

It perhaps isn’t surprising. The culture of consumer electronics has been that a company designs and builds a product to do a particular job. Its failure to do the designed job comes about through the product breaking down. In other words, not doing the job is a failure.

They will have to accustom themselves to the information technology view, where software finalisation is an ongoing process. I downloaded a firmware for a Blu-ray player the other day and it was 95MB in size. That’s about ten times the size, from memory, of the Beta versions of Windows 95 I used to download (via a horrid 28.8K dial-up).

I suspect that the coding of the firmware wasn’t particularly efficient. Still, 95MB is a large program, and it’s unrealistic to think that it will have no errors, nor room for improvement, at all.

So a plea: please put the firmware identifiers in a straightforward information panel. No need to be ashamed that this is an admission of imperfection. That’s the way of the world now.

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Firmware

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

My five-way Blu-ray player comparison review is out in the new issue (Feb/March 2009) of Sound and Image magazine. The review covers lower cost players: the LG BD300, the Panasonic DMP-BD35, the Samsung BD-P1500, the Sharp BD-HP21X and the Sony BDP-S350.

In the summary table, just after the physical dimensions and the like, I specify the firmware version installed in the player. This is a relatively new innovation for me. The fact is, consumer electronics are less and less hardware devices these days, and more and more special purpose computers. Imagine comparing two identical computers, but with one of them running Windows XP and the other running Windows Vista. They would be like completely different machines, even though their hardware is the same.

With Blu-ray players and digital TV receivers this is pretty much the case. New firmware versions are issued quite often, addressing bugs, adding features and so on. For example, Samsung recently added BD-Live capability to its BD-P1500, several months after its launch. So when I review one of these devices, it’s important to say which firmware is installed. Of course, I always make sure that the latest available firmware is installed at the time of the review. Already both the Sony and the Samsung units have had their firmwares upgraded between when I wrote the reviews and when they appeared in print today.

I suggest you keep an eye out for reference to firmware when you are reading reviews.

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Star Trek goes Blu

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Paramount Pictures has just released its Australian Blu-ray release schedule for April and May this year. And this is the first time it is a specific schedule, not just the Blu-ray titles mixed in with the DVD schedule.

A couple of exciting things are included, especially Season 1 of the original series of ‘Star Trek‘. This was released quite a while back on HD DVD, and was brilliant then. I imagine that the level of brilliance will be the same.

Here’s the list:

Madagascar 16 April 2009
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa 16 April 2009
Traitor 16 April 2009
The Heartbreak Kid 16 April 2009
Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter 23 April 2009
‘Star Trek’: The Original Series – Season One 30 April 2009
Star Trek: The Original Crew Movie Collection 30 April 2009
Star Trek: The Motion Picture 14 May 2009
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan 14 May 2009
Star Trek: The Search for Spock 14 May 2009
Star Trek: The Voyage Home 14 May 2009
Star Trek: The Final Frontier 14 May 2009
Revolutionary Road 21 May 2009

 

All the Star Treks have been remastered.

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More Blu-ray vs DVD comparisons

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

The so-called Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Matrix have joined my Blu-ray vs DVD comparisons. The former (which I compared to the PAL Superbit DVD version) is variable in the improvement; the latter is magnificent.

The Matrix was a very important movie in the advance of DVD, and it was an early leader in DVD sales, establishing the format as something here to stay. It also shows how much things have changed, and in particular standards have improved. Some reviews of the Australian DVD release of The Matrix are here, here, and here. It received for video quality at those sites, respectively, 4.5 out of 5 stars, 5 out of 5 stars and 5 out of 5 stars. The TVs used for those reviews were ‘Loewe Art-95 95cm direct view CRT in 16:9 mode’, ‘Panasonic 51cm and 68cm televisions’ and ’48” Sony RPTV’. With today’s bigger screens and HDMI connections, it isn’t surprising that compared to the Blu-ray, I’d give the original DVD release of The Matrix about 2/5 for video quality.

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The Zombie Strippers test

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Zombie Strippers Blu-ray coverIn my recent comparison of inexpensive Blu-ray players for Sound and Image magazine, I introduced a new picture quality test. Here’s how I explained it:

In assessing picture quality, I made resort to a test that shall henceforth be known as ‘Zombie Strippers’. The name is simply too delicious to resist.I base the test on playing back a movie trailer on the recently released Sony Pictures Entertainment Blu-ray of Felon. That is a fine and serious movie, well worth viewing, so forgive it for also carrying a trailer for a dreadfully bad movie called Zombie Strippers. This, apparently, is going to be released on Blu-ray. The trailer itself is in 480i format.

I’ve noticed an odd thing about Blu-ray. NTSC DVDs generally carry their movies in 24 frames per second format (although the frames are divided into interlaced fields). The DVD player performs the 3:2 pulldown required to convert this to 60 frames per second. But on Blu-ray, Special Features presented in 480i format tend to have already had the 3:2 pulldown performed upon them. This uses more space, but Blu-ray has space to burn. So about two fifths of the frames are heavily interlaced, presenting a deinterlacing challenge for some Blu-ray players. It was on this trailer that I first noticed this behaviour. So ‘Zombie Strippers’ will be the test.

That stuff about how the 480i video can be presented in different ways is covered in somewhat more detail here (see the section ‘NTSC — where interlacing goes wrong’).

Incidentally, the pack shot I’ve shown for this movie I grabbed from the persistent storage USB memory stick I used in a Blu-ray player. It had been downloaded from the Internet by the BD-Live facility on one of the Sony BD-Live discs I’d been checking out.

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