Reviews of Blu-Ray movies

Here is a selection of the Blu-Ray reviews, to give you an idea of why the format has taken such intense criticism since it’s launch. Although most of these are early Bluray releases, we are updating these reviews and more titles will be up soon. Suffice it to say the Bluray launch was something of a disaster, although they have improved the quality of more recent releases to the same PQ tier as HD DVD.

RoboCop on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk (note that the disc reviewed was later yanked by MGM just before release and they also moved their home distribution from Sony to Fox. It was later re-encoded and released) - “Holy crap in a can, this disc looks horrible! I've written a couple of previous Blu-ray reviews where I'd called certain discs the worst High Definition image I'd ever seen, thinking HD couldn't possibly get any worse, but here Sony just keeps lowering the bar for the format. The RoboCop Blu-ray is U-G-L-Y. …The problems with this disc all stem from the video transfer and the Blu-ray authoring. RoboCop is not supposed to look like this. No movie is supposed to look like this.  …they oversharpened it with artificial edge enhancement and pumped up the colors way beyond their photographic intentions. As a result, colors are oversaturated throughout the film; flesh tones are frequently orange or red and look unnatural. Metallic silvers are often shaded deep blue. It looks ridiculous, like a cartoon version of the movie. The contrast range is also distorted, with black levels that crush shadow detail and whites clipped on the high end. The edge enhancement is liberally applied and halos are visible all over the place. The Blu-ray image would be considered reasonably sharp by DVD standards but rarely has the detail or depth of good High Definition.  …Sadly, the awful color transfer is just the beginning. The Blu-ray authoring for RoboCop is a compression nightmare. I almost cannot believe how incompetent the work done here is. This is by far the worst digital compression I've ever seen on any High Definition format, and in fact it's been years since I've seen even a regular DVD this bad. Do you remember that notorious original DVD release of Highlander? That's what this looks like. Yes, it's really that bad! This is VCD-quality hackwork. Numerous scenes throughout the film are swarming with compression noise and gigantic pixelation blocks. These cannot be confused with film grain; they're purely digital artifacts, and they're obscene.  …his Blu-ray release is an embarrassment. The people responsible for it should hang their heads in shame and never work in the industry again.  …The results are underwhelming. The track sounds very much like an artificial 5.1 mix, with hollow ambience and gimmicky directional steering. Fidelity is shrill and bass is weak. It sounds OK in general, but color me unimpressed. The PCM track offers little to no audible improvement over the DD 5.1. Since PCM eats up a huge chunk of disc space, this wasteful audio format is largely responsible for the terrible video quality we get on discs like RoboCop. Shame on you again, Sony.”

Dinosaur on Blu-Ray - Peter M. Bracke, High Def Digest - "Unfortunately, most other aspects of this transfer left me disappointed. Colors just are not as vibrant as I expected -- they certainly can't compete with visually spectacular, all-CGI wonders like 'Toy Story' or 'Shrek.' Hues just never pop off the screen, though at least there is no chroma noise or other defects to distract. Sharpness is also wanting. The image is soft throughout, and never appears truly three-dimensional. I know it's not fair, but quickly popping in my standard-def DVD of 'The Incredibles' to compare, it easily trumped the high-def 'Dinosaur' in clarity and detail. Lastly, I was disappointed as well with blacks and contrast. Though black levels are accurate, the image looks too dim overall, as if the bulb in the projector was burning out. In fact, there were some moments during the film (for example a late-night cave scene about midway through) where I had trouble making out what was going on... To be fair, the sound design of 'Dinosaur' never thrilled me much on standard-def DVD, either. It is not only that the mix is far more front-heavy than I demand out of a big-budget animated spectacular like this, but even the depth and impact of the sound quality itself feels muted... Alas, my first Disney Blu-ray sound experience left me feeling underwhelmed at best... Extras: Though 'Dinosaur' came loaded with extras when it was issued as a two-disc Limited Edition DVD, Blu-ray disc storage limitations mean that most of those goodies have been nixed for the film's inaugural high-def release."

Click on Blu-Ray (50 Gig) - Peter M. Bracke, High Def Digest - "'Click' comes to Blu-ray with a bit of historic import. The first-ever BD-50 dual-layer disc to hit the format, this one has a lot of expectations riding on it. If 'Click' looks anything short of fantastic, it may be seen as a bit of a disappointment by some... Now, the big question -- is all the hype surrounding BD-50 justified? Of course, it is impossible to truly know after watching only one title, and there is no BD-25 version of 'Click' to compare anyway... One caveat, though -- and this could well be indicative of the source material -- I did find that darker scenes and some of the more vibrant colors appeared a bit too alive with movement in the form of slight video noise..."

Basic Instinct 2, on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “This is easily the worst-looking Blu-ray I've seen yet, and that's saying quite a lot. Although there are a small handful of close-up shots with a relatively decent sense of detail that I might believe are High Definition, the rest of the disc looks sub-par even by regular DVD standards. Just about every single wide shot looks filtered and flat. Black levels are dull and washed out, colors are shallow, and flesh tones look pallid. Edge enhancement ringing is minor but still visible in some scenes. The worst part of the disc, however, is its digital compression quality. Compression noise and artifacts are out of control in just about every scene. Film grain looks noisy as hell throughout. Even color banding is occasionally problematic. This is a shamefully poor excuse for High Definition.  …Fidelity is decent but not exceptional, and I could hear no difference in quality at all between the PCM and standard Dolby Digital tracks. The PCM track is basically just a huge waste of disc space.”

Training Day on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “The HD DVD released a few months ago is one of the finest discs on that format, its popping High Definition imagery so vivid you feel like you could just step into the movie. The Blu-ray isn't quite that good, but it's close. Obviously sourced from the same master (but compressed here with MPEG2 encoding instead of the superior VC-1), the Blu-ray maintains an excellent sense of detail in both close-ups and wide shots.  …Colors are great, and unlike many Blu-rays it looks like High Definition from the first frame to the last. Judged on its own, this is a fine disc and probably the best thing I've seen on Blu-ray to date.  …Directly comparing the movie on both formats (and it would be disingenuous not to), the HD DVD edition indeed looks a bit better. On that disc, I found myself marveling at the clarity of even the tiniest details in every shot. I didn't have quite that reaction to the Blu-ray, which is slightly softer and duller, with a little less depth. The difference isn't huge, but it's enough to be noticeable.  …The MPEG2 compression has only one significant flaw that I noticed. The opening shot of a sunrise exhibits serious color banding. The HD DVD has a similar problem but to a much lesser extent. It's barely noticeable on that disc, but extremely glaring on this one. Otherwise, I didn't find any compression problems worth noting (a true rarity for Blu-ray), which speaks well for the care that Warner puts into their transfers.”

Stir of Echoes on Blu-Ray - Peter M. Bracke, High Def Digest - "...it still suffers from a slightly hazy, spotty appearance... Still, the transfer subsequently suffers from a lack of depth in some scenes. I was also disappointed that posterization was apparent on some of the overcast Chicago skies, as well as noise on large patches of color, such as solid walls, during interior scenes... Overall, this is another inconsistent Blu-ray transfer -- I've seen better, but I've also seen worse... Extras: Lionsgate has released 'Stir of Echoes' a couple of times on standard-def DVD, and the most recent release had a quite a few notable extras. However, for the film's Blu-ray debut the studio has pared down the supplements considerably, so we're left with a rather slim package."

The Terminator, on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “The problem is that the Blu-ray hardly looks like High Definition at all. In fact, in the majority of scenes it's barely distinguishable from the 2001 DVD edition of the movie.  …the video also has a filtered appearance common to the other Sony Blu-ray launch titles. Using MPEG2 compression on a single-layer disc burdened by space-hogging PCM audio takes an obvious toll. Compression problems such as noise and frozen grain patterns are visible in some of the most difficult scenes like those hazy shots of the L.A. streets at night.

The Fifth Element, on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “…you'd expect it to likewise showcase the wonders of High Definition video. Sadly, not so much. The disc is kind of a mess. When a brand new video format can't even get The Fifth Element to look good, something is seriously wrong.  …The single most shocking disappointment of this Blu-ray disc is seeing the poor condition of the film elements used for the video transfer.  …That isn't the only problem, sadly. By HD standards the video looks very filtered and pasty. The image is rather flat, without much sense of depth. Sharpness and detail are on the whole only modestly better than the DVD edition, and in selected shots I actually found the DVD to have better fine object detail. For example, after the opening credits the first pan down to the Egyptian excavation site is positively fuzzy on the Blu-ray but better focused on the DVD. Also, during the scenes in Father Cornelius' apartment, the individual strands of Leeloo's hair are rendered with better clarity on the DVD; that section of the frame just sort of blurs together on the Blu-ray. This isn't the case with every shot, of course; most do indeed look better on the Blu-ray, but the fact that any parts of the movie could look better on the lower-resolution video format is disturbing. And the fact that even the best parts of the new disc barely look like High Definition at all is just disheartening.  …The movie runs over two hours and has been squeezed onto a single-layer disc with inefficient MPEG2 compression and a space-hogging PCM audio track. The digital compression is not always up to the task. The opening credits look rather shimmery (they do on the DVD as well, for that matter), and minor compression noise is sometimes visible in the busiest of scenes.  …Extras: Only one of the supplements from the Ultimate Edition DVD has carried over.”

Eight Below on Blu-Ray - Peter M. Bracke, High Def Digest - "Occasionally, however, I notice a slight bit of wavering with colors on solid patches of background, such as skies and sunsets. Softness, too, can be an issue, with close-ups quite sharp, but medium and long shots tend to be flatter... Unfortunately, this transfer does suffer from a lack of consistency, but when it hits, it hits the bull's eye... Extras: Similar to Sony and Lionsgate's initial Blu-ray offerings, Buena Vista has largely eschewed extras on their first discs as well. That's partly due to this being a more bitrate-deprived BD-25 single-layer disc, as well as Disney's decision to opt for uncompressed PCM soundtracks, which take up more space. In any case, the pickings here are quite slim indeed, and just about all of the extras from the standard-def DVD are gone."

Total Recall on Bluray - Dean Winkelspecht, DVD Town - "Detail was a bit lacking in this high definition transfer and looked only marginally better than the Special Limited Edition DVD playing in an upconverted DVD player. A few sequences exhibited a minor amount of posterization, mostly in the opening sequence. After that, the digital compression appeared to be quite good, but the image simply lacked the detail of many other high definition transfers... The former DVD release, the “Total Recall: Special Limited Edition” was not the most feature laden release. However, that release was far superior to the Blu-Ray reincarnation of the film. The commentary track and features from that previous release are all missing, with one exception... “Total Recall” continue to show that Blu-Ray has some catching up to do with HD-DVD when it comes to value added content... if you already have the DVD version that came in a pretty Mars shaped container, then you may want to just skip out until the next Blu-Ray release of the film is made."

Saw, On Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “Now for the bad part: There's a fair amount of grain in the picture, but the digital noise is much worse.  The dirty white floor of the room where Adam and Lawerance are trapped looks like it's moving and the doctor's blue shirt seems to shimmer on his back.  The grain I can live with but the noise was a bit distracting. There are also a couple of spots on the print that was used for the transfer, something I was surprised to see.  There were only five or six defects through the entire film, but there shouldn't be any in such a recent title.  I hate to be nit-picky, but with the cost of the player and the discs, I think consumers should expect an outstanding product.  …Extras: There are no extras.  I am really getting tired of these bare-bones, or nearly so, Blu-Ray discs.”

The Big Hit on Blu-Ray - Peter M. Bracke, High Def Digest - "Anyway, Sony has transferred the film in 1080p/MPEG-2 video, and this is what I would call a mediocre high-def presentation. Meaning it looks better than standard definition, but compared to the better high-def material I've seen it feels dated. The source material is in good but not pristine shape. Though there is no extensive print damage or excessive dirt, I did notice a few speckles here and there, as well as a couple of instances of bigger dirt splotches. Colors are also fairly well-saturated and stable but never truly vibrant or eye-popping. Fleshtones also veered somewhat towards the red end of the spectrum. Hardly more impressive is detail, which lacks that genuine sense of depth and three-dimensionality I want and expect with HD. Contrast seems a tad harsh, and the fall-off to black too steep, which gives the transfer a dark, flat cast. Granted, 'The Big Hit' does not look terrible -- in spots it can even look quite good -- but it still rates as average high-def at best... As with the video, the audio also suffers from a dated feel... Dynamic range is decent, but it feels flat and lacking in fullness. High end isn't really scratchy or shrill, but it still sounds cheap and canned. There is also little real low-end to speak of... There are also some weird anomalies that pop up from time to time. Arbitrarily, dialogue will suddenly drop off as a person finishes speaking -- it's as if someone clipped the volume on the last syllable at the end of every section of dialogue. Strange. And surround use is dull and uninspired, with only action sound effects deployed to the rear channels at the most obvious times... Extras: For once, the fact that Sony didn't port over every last supplement from the DVD to the Blu-ray release didn't bug me, because I really didn't want to know anything more about 'The Big Hit' after watching it."

UltraViolet, On Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “To say that this is one of the best looking Blu-rays released so far is damning the format with faint praise. After my initial batch of reviews criticizing Blu-ray quality, I was assured by a number of people that UltraViolet is really the first disc to show off the potential of the High-Def format. Well, maybe it does, but that's not much of a compliment.  …What colors we do see have been cranked up as far as computers will push them, and are often oversaturated and smeary. Contrasts have also been pushed at both the high and low ends; the picture has a very deep black level but poor shadow detail, and the bright portions of the screen also clip away detail there. Compression quality is hard to judge because the minor digital blockiness and artifacting visible in many parts of the movie may in fact be endemic to the production. It's hard to tell which flaws are caused by the disc and which are caused by the overuse of crappy CGI in every shot. Some color banding is also problematic in a few scenes, which I'm inclined to blame on the disc mastering. I really hope this isn't the best that Blu-ray can do. An 87-minute movie with next to no fine object detail or complex rendering of colors is hardly a digital compression challenge. Even inefficient MPEG2 on a single-layer disc burdened by PCM audio should be able to handle it. Blu-ray will need to overcome bigger obstacles than this to prove itself.  …I wasn't particularly impressed with the fidelity of either the DD 5.1 or PCM tracks, unfortunately. Music and sound effects sounded particularly dull. This is probably more of an issue with the movie's production than with Blu-ray technology, but in any case the audio is merely satisfactory.”

Silent Hill, on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “Here we have yet another wildly inconsistent HD transfer from Sony. The movie has terrific photography and production design that should make nice High Definition eye candy, but what we get on disc alternates between periods of mediocre, awful, great, mediocre, great, and awful again. There are a few selected scenes that have excellent sharpness, detail, and depth, but in more scenes than not the picture looks very flat and lacking. Since this is a Sony disc, it should go without saying that a minor presence of edge enhancement is par for the course. The contrast range seems to be artificially compressed, with shallow black levels and dulled whites. Scenes inside the ghost town look appropriately stark and dreary, but scenes in the outside world have weirdly oversaturated colors and reddish flesh tones that just look off. I could be wrong, but I don't think this was an artistic decision. It doesn't have the typical appearance of digitally manipulated color timing; it looks like someone misadjusted their settings during the telecine transfer. More problematic, and unfortunately typical for Blu-ray, is that the MPEG2 compression just can't handle a movie of this length and visual complexity when burdened with Blu-ray's current space limitations and bit-hungry PCM audio. Dark scenes (which comprise most of the movie) often exhibit noisy grain. There's also a lot of high frequency noise in fine object detail such as facial features during medium and wide shots. Many parts of the movie look fine, but in the busiest scenes the compression totally breaks down. For example, shots outside during the ashen snowfall just have way too much going on in the frame and are overwhelmed with ugly compression noise. Don't mistake what I'm describing. This isn't photographic grain; it's an obvious digital compression artifact. The scene where our heroine wakes up in the bowling alley is also an unholy compression nightmare, with giant swarms of electronic noise all over the screen.  …When will Sony ever get it right?  …It's just too bad that PCM (audio) does so much damage to the video bit-rate. If the Blu-ray format were ready to support them, a losslessly compressed format like Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio could have offered the same audio quality without sacrificing the video. …Extras: There's not a damn thing on the disc except some HD previews for other unrelated Sony horror movies: Underworld Evolution, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Basic Instinct 2. Missing from the standard DVD edition is an hour-long making-of documentary.”

RV, on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “The transfer is uneven though.  I was surprised to notice that a minority of scenes appear very flat and not as vibrant as the rest of the film.  There were only a few areas like this though, but it's too bad there had to be any. Of course there is some digital noise that infects large patches of color, something that has marred most other Blu-Ray discs that I've seen.”

Stir Of Echoes on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “Like many of the current Blu-ray discs, this one is a mixed bag.  …Unfortunately there are some problems with this disc. Once again, I was surprised to see spots on the image. While this wasn't a problem though the whole film, there were a couple of scenes that had several white specks flicker by. It would have been easy to clean that up, and I'm surprised that they didn't take the time to do so. Digital noise is also a problem in a few places, main in exterior scenes were sky is showing.  …Extras: Many of the extras that appeared on the Special Edition DVD released in 2004 are missing from this Blu-ray edition, which is a shame, but they did port some of them over.”

Basic Instinct 2 on Bluray - James Plath, DVD Town - "more than the other Sony Blu-ray discs I've reviewed thus far, "Basic Instinct 2" was a disappointment. Some of the scenes, like the opening, are so sharp you'd swear you could reach into your set and touch Stone or that gear shift. But others are grainy and don't seem to have nearly the same level of detail. Admittedly, more than a few of these scenes had soft-focus backgrounds, but even the figures in the foreground didn't have the leap-out-at-you clarity that you'd hope for. Then too, there are annoying occasional stoppages, the kind you experience on a dual-layered disc when the player shifts from one layer to the next. It's sharper than an SD, but not as sharp as you'd hope for a the next generation of discs... but it lacks 10 deleted scenes and an alternate ending that are included on the SD-DVD and Unrated editions."

A Knight’s Tale, on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “Unfortunately, this is yet another mediocre Blu-ray offering from Sony. On the plus side, the movie's basic color transfer is bright, sharp, and fairly vibrant. Edge enhancement is present (it wouldn't be a Sony disc without it), but generally not too obscene. Black level seems a little shallow, though, and white detail is noticeably clipped. The colors also seem a bit overcranked in some scenes, with flesh tones that run toward orange or red.  …The problem is that the movie's photography is mildly grainy throughout, and in its present state the Blu-ray format doesn't handle grain very well. Although sometimes it's rendered well enough to look like actual film grain, for most of the movie the grain is poorly compressed and looks like electronic video noise. You can see this layer of noise in the background of almost every single scene for the first 3/4 of the movie, and at its worst it manifests as visible pixelation in details such as the leaves on trees behind the actors.  …The fidelity of the songs on the soundtrack is just OK, some coming across rather stridently. The space-hogging PCM in this case does seem to offer some mild improvement over the basic Dolby Digital, but neither is truly reference quality, and the minor audio boost hardly seems worth the hit to picture quality that it causes.  …Extras: Nada. Zip. Zilch. The movie was released three times previously on the DVD format, one of them with a commentary and several featurettes. I suppose you could argue that Sony is trying to replicate their feature-less Superbit edition with this Blu-ray, but it's especially irritating that they couldn't have at least dropped the useless French dub to squeeze in the commentary. Thanks for nothing.”

Crash, on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “The problem is that the transfer is uneven.  While the car explosion had a lot of eye pop, the car on fire near the end of the film didn't look nearly as impressive.  The flames licking the sky appeared rather flat and didn't have the depth that the earlier fire scene did.  Blacks were also a problem.  In some scenes the blacks were rock solid and in others they appeared to be slightly washed out.  The colors had the same problem.  Though they were often very pleasing to the eye, in some scenes the hues look a little too soft and weak. Digital noise was also a problem, something that has effected many Blu-Ray discs.  This wasn't as bad as it was in Saw, but large patches of color were often accompanied by fair amounts of noise that caused them to shimmer slightly.  This was a problem with both the component and HDMI outputs.  …Extras: Once again, Lions Gate delivers a bare bones disc.  With all of the bonus items on the two-disc SE, there was pleanty of material to choose from.  It's a shame they didn't include any of that ready-made material on this disc.  How hard would it have been to include the director's commentary?”

The Devils Rejects on Blu-Ray - Peter M. Bracke, High Def Digest - "Admittedly, the image is sometimes unstable. For example, there is a scene early on where Sheri Moon Zombie flirts with soon-to-be-victim Geoffrey Lewis in front of an icebox, and there is some weird coloring to their faces that didn't seem to match the rest of the picture. I also noticed select shots where detail seems to falter a bit and the sense of depth to the image flattens out, such as the interiors of the now-infamous hotel room massacre... Extras: Though the two-disc Unrated Edition DVD of 'The Devil's Rejects' was loaded with extras, unfortunately space limitations on Blu-ray mean most of the previous set's goodies have been trimmed. Which is too bad..."

Silent Hill on Blu-Ray - Dan Bradley, The Man Room - "‘Silent Hill’s’ two-hour plus runtime, lossless PCM 5.1 audio, frenetic imagery and ashen gray or dark settings provide a daunting amount of material for Blu-ray Disc’s MPEG-2 compression to cram onto a single 25GB disc. Even with the absence of extra features found on the DVD version, this transfer is unable to consistently keep up with the source material. The appearance of annoying digital noise and muddy blacks come and go with the frequency of the darkness that haunts the town of Silent Hill. These switches that instantly shift the color palette from grim blacks to bright whites and grays bring out the flaws, including a small amount of print specks, the most... Of all the Blu-ray Discs Sony has released to-date, ‘Silent Hill’ would have benefited from a BD-50 disc treatment more than any other. The added space would have first and foremost cleaned up the erratic roller coaster picture clarity ride, and also allowed the filmmakers and even Konami to explain the background behind all the cool hell imagery through commentaries and featurettes. Instead, ‘Silent Hill’ on Blu-ray Disc will leave diehard fans of the game series scratching their head at the uninspired origin story, newcomers scratching their head at the barrage of unexplained hell imagery, and everyone scratching their head at another missed opportunity for Blu-ray Disc to shine by letting us “Experience (True) High Definition” on a rare new theatrical release and commendable video game-to-film adaptation."

Species, on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “The 2.35:1 widescreen image is not as strong as I was hoping it would be. It looks very similar to the SD Species SE DVD. Some of the scenes are clearly superior with a nice 3D look, but a majority of the movie lacks the HD pop and comes across as flat. There is a little dirt on the master that they used. Not much but it I was still disappointed to see the spots. The image has a lot of grain too, and a bit of digital noise.  …I screened the film with the PCM (audio) track and found it to be satisfactory but not outstanding. …Extras: While most of the bonus items from the SE are not on this disc (no surprise there after seeing the other Sony Blu-Ray discs) there are some extras.”

House Of Flying Daggers on Bluray - Dean Winkelspecht, DVD Town - "The title is visually inconsistent and moves between looking stunning and looking like a standard definition DVD title... Early Blu-Ray titles are forced to be squeezed onto a single-layer disc as the dual-layer discs are proving difficult to manufacture. They are also compressed in MPEG-2 compression and are not quite pushing the envelope... In the early days, Blu-Ray is disappointing and for nearly half the film, “House of Flying Daggers” echoes that disappointment... The level of detail is just wildly inconsistent. I’m not sure if this a problem of the MPEG-2 compression and the limited space of the single layer or something else, but compared to what I’ve seen on HD-DVD, Blu-Ray needs a bit more work to fill its claim of being ‘beyond high definition... HD-DVD has been porting over the best available supplements from the standard definition DVD release, minus a few filmographies and theatrical trailers. Blu-Ray on the other hand has been omitting most or all of the value added content from the previous releases. “House of Flying Daggers” manages to keep a small number of the supplements from the DVD, but original discs commentary track, making of featurette, music video and costumes gallery are all lost to the next generation format."

The Punisher, on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “This is the first Lionsgate Blu-Ray disc I've seen, and I was hoping that this would be more impressive than the offering from Sony, but it really isn't.  Like most of the other Blu-Ray releases, the movie looks good but not as eye-popping or impressive as an HD movie should look.  The widescreen 2.35:1 image is a bit soft; the lines are not as tight as they should be.  There is also more grain and digital noise in the image than I was expecting.  …Extras: Ziltch.  They didn't put any extras on this disc.”

xXx on Bluray - Dean Winkelspecht, DVD Town - "There are a few scenes where the picture looks absolutely stunning. Then, there are scenes that appear blurry and somewhat out of focus when compared to those that were absolutely stunning. I’ve seen this inconsistency on practically every Blu-Ray disc I’ve watched. There are moments when the visual transfer of Blu-Ray can almost rival what I’ve seen on the better HD-DVD releases and there are moments when it barely transcends what I’ve seen on the older SD-DVD titles. Detail, as mentioned, is all over the place. One moment it amazes and the next minute it doesn’t quite amaze. Much of this may be due to the MPEG-2 compression or the current space limitations of the single layer... The biggest complaint I have about Blu-Ray right now is the complete lack of supplements. HD-DVD is doing a great job of adding value-added content (“Cinderella Man” and “Jarhead” add supplements from the costlier multi-disc editions) and releases are slowly starting to show HD-DVD only features. They are trying to make that new format a worthy replacement of the old standard. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, seems like the next generation of Superbit releases. You get a higher quality transfer of the film, but no supplements. Will there be a Blu-Ray Deluxe? ...The Blu-Ray release of “xXx” I preordered when I blindly expected all of the recent supplements to appear on it. I didn’t do my homework and was rewarded with no special features and still no first hand account on what happened to Xander Cage. Sony gets my money and I get no satisfaction."

Hitch, on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by the image quality of this disc.  …The first thing that struck me about the widescreen (2.35 : 1) image was how soft it appeared.  …Another surprising thing was the amount of grain, or possibly digital noise, that was present in the picture.  Large fields of a solid color, such as the sky over New York City, weren't uniformly solid and even, there was a texture to them caused by the grain.  These large areas would also move, ever so slightly, which surely wasn't what the director intended.  …if you freeze on a frame and look at it carefully, viewers will also notice some slight posterization, where the colors on her face change in computer generated steps, rather than a gradual change.  …sometimes details were lost in these dark areas.  Will Smith's hair was often a single colored shape with no texture or depth to it.  Eva Mendes's black jacket seems to merge with her dark blue Beatles shirt in her introductory scene too.  This was a more minor problem than the others that were mentioned, but it was disappointing to see none the less..  …The image isn't as sharp and defined as it could be, there is posterization in places (probably a result of the MPEG compression that is being used) and details are sometimes lost in dark areas.  …Am I being hard on this disc?  Yes I am.  I wouldn't have spent the time and energy critiquing a regular DVD to this extent, and if it was a SD DVD it would have gotten high marks.  The thing is, this isn't a regular DVD.  It's the next generation of digital video and as such it should be judged to a higher standard.  It's obvious that Sony is still having a bit of trouble mastering discs for their new system, and that's not totally unexpected.  …When the HD formats were first announced, I predicted that these early titles would have new and exciting bonus material to give people an incentive to make the jump to a new system.  While I still think it would be a cheap and easy way to sell some players and discs, apparently Sony doesn't.  There aren't any bonus items on this disc that weren't on the SD version, in fact, several featurettes that were on the regular version are omitted from this Blu-Ray disc.  Thanks a lot Sony. Another slap in the face to early adopters of this format is the fact that the extras, all in 4:3 format, are stretched to fill a 16:9 picture.”

Basic Instinct 2 on Blu-Ray - Dan Bradley, The Man Room - "The first film designed to sell sex appearing on Blu-ray suffers from some of the same excessive grain and blurriness found on past Blu-ray releases... The PCM 5.1 uncompressed audio, on the other hand, has no excuse for lacking in terms of offering enveloping surround on a consistent basis. As with the plot, once Catherine’s car plummets into the river, the audio mix is unable to reach the same level of 5.1 surround excellence experienced during the opening scene... Extras: Sony continues their Blu-ray trend of minimal extra features, which in this film’s case is a welcome decision."

House of Flying Daggers, on Bluray – Joshua Zyber, DVD Talk – “Here's the problem: although this disc is an improvement over the comparable (mediocre) DVD, it's quite awful by High Definition standards. It looks essentially like the DVD should have looked, not like an HD disc should look. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this is the worst HD image I've ever seen. The picture is distractingly soft. As mentioned, certain textures like clothing look decent in close-up (by DVD standards, at least), but wide shots lose definition and the actors' faces look waxy if not outright blurry. It's true that if you check the same shots on the DVD, they're also soft on that disc, but the problem was less obvious on the lower-resolution medium and stands out in stark clarity here. There is no detail at all in things like skin pores or complexion as you'll see in the best High Definition sources. I'll concede that the movie may have a deliberately soft photographic style, but the disc goes too far and looks excessively filtered and compressed. The image is often dupey and flat, with no sense of depth. Compression noise and image shimmer are problematic in scenes with high levels of detail; for example, keep an eye on the beaded curtains in the background of wide shots inside the Peony Pavilion. Film grain is poorly compressed and looks noisy as hell, especially during the bamboo forest scene. To put it bluntly, this disc is a disaster. By virtue of the fact that it does indeed look better than the movie's DVD edition, I'll be generous and give this Blu-ray's picture quality a couple of stars. However, it's plainly obvious that the space constraints caused by using inefficient MPEG2 compression on a single-layer disc cluttered by space-hogging PCM audio has taken a serious toll. For a premiere launch title intended to sell the public on the merits of the new Blu-ray video format, this disc is an embarrassment..."

House of Flying Daggers, on Bluray – John Sinnott, DVD Talk – “The video quality of this disc seems to fall at both ends of the spectrum:  It either looks really good or fairly bad.  It seems that the MPEG2 encoding didn't work as well as it was supposed to in many sections of the film. A good example of the poor encoding is the scene where Mei is first introduced to Jin in the house of pleasure.  The first closeup of the lovely Ziyi Zhang isn't as pristine as it should be.  Her skin tone doesn't shift gradually from one tone to another, there's a small amount of contrast between the two shades.  This posterization mars an otherwise nice looking image.  …There's a fair amount of digital noise in the picture too.  When Mei is sitting in the bamboo forest just before being attacked, the green stalks that surround her shimmer and move almost as if they are vibrating. The worst offense that this transfer commits is the lack of sharpness.  Many areas, though by no means all, are very soft.  So soft that the image looks like it's slightly blurred.  Where Mei is pulling Jin across the landscape near the end is a good example.  Mei's green cloak is indistinct and the lines are blurry.  …As with the other Blu-Ray discs that were released at the format's launch, this disc leaves out many bonus features that were included in the standard definition DVD.  The commentary track is no where to be found (they decided to add a Spanish language track instead), and the 45-minute making-of featurette is also gone.  Extras: The only extras that are included on this disc are Creating the Visual Effects, a four minute short, and a handful of storyboard comparisons.  Both of these were ported over from the SD DVD of course.  Heaven forbid that any unique content be included on the Blu-Ray discs.”

Hitch on Bluray - James Plath, DVD Town - "As with other Sony discs I've looked at, the quality varies throughout the film and there are several "hiccups" where there's a noticeable gap, the kind you get when a dual-layered SD-DVD switches from the first to the second layer. Unfortunately, at least one gap comes at a crucial moment, when Hitch is giving his big, sincere, win-her-back speech. Come on, tech people, can we work a little harder to bury those moments in scene transitions? Extras: The SD release was surprisingly bare bones, and these Blu-ray bones have even less meat... Now, the glitch in the Blu-ray "Hitch" is that you only get two of those five short features: the dance segment and the dating experts segment. Haven't studios figured out what collectors want by now? I have to say that I'm not going to get rid of my SD-DVD version of "Hitch" precisely because of the extra extras. But how many cabinets do these movie moguls think we have in our houses? ...Three deleted scenes and an Amerie music video are also MIA on this disc... "

Species on Bluray - Dean Winkelspecht, DVD Town - "The Blu-Ray release of the film carries over many of the same flaws that plagued the DVD release and though it too is an improvement, “Species” still does not look very good. The level of detail in the film ranges from being good to not-so-good. Some scenes exhibit high level of detail and the picture is clean. Other moments find a higher than acceptable amount of film grain and lack of detail. Though an improvement, “Species” on Blu-Ray was far from being ‘beyond high definition.’ “Species” sounds adequate and is not a disappointing sounding release, but it hardly rises above the soundtracks provided on the previous DVD release."

Swordfish on Bluray - John J. Puccio and Dean Winkelspecht, DVD Town - "Warner Bros. continues to dominate the Blu-Ray format with their release of “Swordfish.” Their utilization of the VC-1 compression technology keeps them on the pole position and this is another fine release from the WB. Presented with a 2.4:1 aspect ration and 1080p resolution, the image quality of “Swordfish” is brightly colored and highly detailed and helps cement this title as one of the best looking Blu-Ray titles yet released. Detail and color are the two elements that instantly strike the viewer as being truly high definition. Colors are incredibly bright and beautifully saturated. Black levels are just as strong as the colors. Film grain is absent, as are any other faults in either the source materials or digital compression. Warner Bros. is going to hold the pole position for the Blu-Ray format until another studio steps up with VC-1 compression or the dual layer discs are readied for mass production."

Copyright 2006, 2007 Edward Downer. The opinions expressed on this site are those of its creators. We hope that you'll enjoy these pages! - Edward.