DVD image comparison: Unleashed (SD vs. HD)
I lied! Despite earlier claiming that it would probably be “a couple of days” before any actual standard definition to high definition comparisons were made available on this site, I decided to go all-out and have one ready for this very night. The first ever Whiggles.com SD vs. HD Image Comparison is for Unleashed, looking at the DVD and HD DVD sides of this combo release.
If you head over to the comparison now, you’ll probably notice that a couple of things have changed from the days when I only pitted one DVD release against another. For a start, the video, audio and extras ratings (out of 10) have been removed, simply because SD and HD are on completely different playing fields, so an actual side by side numerical comparison would be pointless.
Secondly, for my image roll-overs, I have opted to present a portion of each frame rather than the whole thing. This is for two reasons. One, to save bandwidth (although, as I am allocated a terabyte of the stuff every month, I’m not sure that there’s any actual point in this). Two, a full-size HD capture has a resolution of 1920x1080 - I don’t know about you, but that’s more than my desktop resolution. Therefore, to keep things manageable, and to avoid breaking the site’s design, I opted for 720x720 crops. The HD image retains its original resolution, while the SD image is first scaled up to 1920x1080 and then cropped to match its HD counterpart.
With any luck, these changes will be to everyone’s satisfaction, and hopefully you’ll get something out of this first comparison. Unleashed may not be a title that shows off the HD DVD format to its fullest potential, but it constitutes a massive improvement over its SD counterpart, and hopefully the comparison will make this crystal clear.
Enjoy!
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