HD DVD

Hannibal Blu-ray impressions

Well, it took long enough, but Ridley Scott's Hannibal has finally been released in high definition. In my opinion the best of the Hannibal Lecter films, this was one of my most eagerly anticipated titles for an HD release since both formats launched. It was initially announced for an April 2007 Blu-ray release from MGM in the US, but it disappeared into the same void that claimed several of the studio's catalogue titles when distribution partner 20th Century Fox staged an abrupt exit from the format over copy protection concerns (LOL). Then, it showed up in the schedules again on the other side of the Atlantic, this time as a French HD DVD release from Universal. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with French home video releases, it missed its August 2007 release date and ultimately never surfaced. Luckily, however, German distributors Universum Film, UFA and Tobis have come to the rescue, releasing it on October 30th. My copy arrived today.

First, the good news. It's region free, and includes separate English and German DTS-HD High Resolution (i.e. non-lossless) 6.1 audio tracks, with PowerDVD reporting a constant bit rate of 4.6 Mbps. English and German subtitles are included, both optional. Finally, all of the bonus materials from the original 2-disc DVD release have been ported over, including the Ridley Scott commentary, deleted scenes and 75-minute documentary Breaking the Silence: The Making of Hannibal.

On to the transfer, we have a VC-1 encode on a dual-layer BD50, and it's an above average but not particularly amazing presentation of the film. The same master that was used for the various DVD releases appears to have been trotted out again here, as evinced by the higher than expected amount of print damage and gate weave that it exhibits (not that either of these are overly troubling, but for a film from as recent as 2001 they are surprising to see). The biggest problem appears to be noise reduction, which particularly affects the wide shots, giving them a waxy and insubstantial look. It's not Dark City bad, but it's closer to that particular disaster than I would have liked. Close-ups fare far better, as close-ups invariably do, and luckily they take up the bulk of the film's running time. There's a moderate amount of ringing on display, again most noticeable in the wide shots, while the grain tends to look a little clumpy. Detail is about average, never really "popping" but at least offering a sizeable improvement over the Region 2 Superbit DVD, previously the sharpest of the bunch (Julianne Moore's delightful moustache, for instance, is for the first time readily visible during the tense climax in the kitchen).

In the overall scheme of things, I'd rate this somewhere around the middle echelon for catalogue titles. It's nothing like as bad as, say, Universal's worst, but at the same time don't expect anything as ravishing as The Godfather: Part III or Scott's Blade Runner. With a new master, I suspect the image quality could have been noticeably improved, but I have a feeling that isn't going to happen any time soon. I certainly wouldn't hold out for MGM to get off their fat asses and release it in the US: we'd be unlikely to see any significant gains in the image quality department, and they'd probably drop all the extras to boot. Basically, you can safely buy this with the assumption that it's the best you'll get in the foreseeable future.

Hannibal
(Universum Film/UFA/Tobis, Germany, VC-1, 33.1 GB)

Update, November 5th, 2008 09:16 PM: I should point out that the extras are all standard definition PAL rather than NTSC, and as such won't play on North American equipment.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of October

• Carrie (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Chicken Run (R0 France, Blu-ray)
• Disturbia (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• The Fourth Protocol (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Frighteners (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• How the West Was Won (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• In the Folds of the Flesh (R0 USA, DVD)
• L.A. Confidental (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Léon: The Professional (RB Germany, Blu-ray)
• Lewis: Series Two (R2 UK, DVD)
• A Mighty Heart (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Monster (R0 Germany, Blu-ray)
• The Omen Collection (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Sleeping Beauty (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Trial & Retribution: The Third Collection (R2 UK, DVD)

Oh god... that sound is my bank balance groaning. It's been a long, long time since I bought this many titles in a single month - chalk it up to timing more than anything. I shall have to take care to ration myself strictly for the next little while.

Dead format + cheap-ass discs = a fun night at the movies

Ever since the demise of HD DVD, the price of standalone players as sky-rocketed, while, at the same time, the exact opposite has happened to the media they play. Over at HMV's UK web site, a number of HD DVD titles, some of them very good, are being pawned off for silly amounts of money, starting at £2.99 per title. Always on the look-out for a bargain, I picked up Disturbia, an extremely derivative but actually rather enjoyable rip-off of Hitchcock's Rear Window, starring that annoying kid with the stupid name from Transformers and the new Indiana Jones film. I also grabbed A Mighty Heart (Angelina Jolie in blackface FTW!!!) and The Frighteners (a sort of half-way point between Peter Jackson's earlier adventures with over the top exploitation romps and his later obsession with poorly edited, overly long CGI reels).

Disturbia features a rather good transfer taken from a decent master, albeit one that has been excessively grain reduced. The grain can't have been that heavy to begin with, as facial features are, for the most part, still there, but it does mean that the image has a somewhat synthetic appearance, particularly in the opening sequence in which LaBeouf and his pops mash some fish and then, in a curious Karmic twist, get mashed themselves while on the road. Still, not bad at all for under three quid.

Disturbia
(Paramount, UK, AVC, 19 GB)

Home Alone comes to Blu-ray

Aboard the HMS Whimsy, it is a long-held tradition that, each Christmas, we watch the holiday classic Home Alone (and it is a classic, whatever the naysayers might claim). In years gone by, we were forced to make do with the old Region 2 PAL DVD from 1999, one of the worst standard definition DVDs ever released (and beaten only, or so I'm told, by the even worse Region 1 NTSC version). Then, in 2006, we were able to upgrade to the newly released Family Fun Edition, which, shameful name aside, turned out to be a massive improvement over its predecessor.

This Christmas will be something special, however. Why? Because, for the first time, we will be watching Home Alone in high definition.

Yessir, Home Alone is coming to Blu-ray. As reported by High-Def Digest, 20th Century Fox have scheduled it for a December 2 release in the US. No details have been announced yet, barring the RRP of $34.99, but this is definitely one title I'll be pre-ordering without a moment's hesitation. Laugh at me if you like, but this is one of my most anticipated HD releases and has been since I first got wind of Blu-ray and HD DVD.

I have a new toy

Today, I found myself in possession of an Xbox 360 Arcade System. If you've been reading my brother's blog, you'll know that his Xbox 360 recently died a tragic death. It came back the other day after being repaired after Microsoft refused to service it (apparently it didn't have enough red rings or something), sounding like a vacuum cleaner thanks to its new cooling system, which we both agreed wasn't ideal for watching movies: until it pegged it, it doubled as both a games console and our HD DVD player.

With prices of standalone HD DVD players having gone through the roof after being discontinued, I decided that the only semi-cost-effective solution to having a way of playing my 60+ HD DVD titles was to pick up a 360 myself. I ended up getting a reasonable deal on the Arcade package, which gives you five free mini-games, plus a retail game of your choice (I went with Mass Effect, which I haven't checked out yet), and it arrived today. The timing was, though I say it myself, impeccable, as Lyris' 360 died yet another death within two hours of the new system's arrival.

The irony of the situation is that I've never bought a single console game in my life, and yet I now own both of the current generation of games consoles. (I hear there's a little thing called the Wii as well, but last time I checked there wasn't very much software available for it that actually qualified as what I would call "games".)

Film on Blu-ray in "looking like film" shocker

On Saturday, I received my copy of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration on Blu-ray, containing all three films in the series, the transfers for the first two being derived from new restorations carried out by Robert A. Harris, arguably the best man in the field of film restoration. The Godfather Part III, intriguingly enough, is the best-looking of the bunch on Blu-ray, although to what degree this is due to the state of the elements, the way these elements were manipulated, or Coppola's original aesthetic choices, is unclear.

What is clear is that this disc constitutes the new gold standard to which all film-sourced transfers in high definition should aspire. I was floored by how good this disc looks. As a broad rule, I've tended to find that the best-looking titles released in high definition are invariably those sourced from a digital intermediate rather than film elements, with film-sourced materials generally either being treated poorly (see many of Universal's back catalogue titles) or simply having less available "resolution" to begin with due to the inherent shortcomings of a process which results in reduced quality with each subsequent generation. The Godfather Part III, however, is up there with the best of the DI-sourced transfers. I can see no evidence of any sort of tampering - the grain is wonderfully reproduced, the detail is excellent, and (a rarity, I've found, in film-sourced transfers) there is no artificial edge enhancement or ringing to be found. This would be a definite 10/10 were it not for the fact that the compression seems slightly dicey at times - strange, given that the bit rate is approaching 40 Mbit/sec more or less throughout.

Still, a phenomenal achievement throughout and one that has raised the bar as far as transfers for catalogue titles are concerned.

The Godfather Part III
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 44.3 GB)

There's an excellent article on the restoration process at the American Society of Cinematographers web site.

The first person who says it looks grainy gets a good hard slap

Way back last December, back when the ill-fated HD DVD format was still just hanging in there, I was pretty psyched when German distributor Senator Home Entertainment announced high definition releases of Planet Terror and Death Proof, the two instalments of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's ode to the B-movies of yesteryear. With US rights holders The Weinstein Company having disappeared off the face of the HD map, it looked as if Senator were our best chance of seeing these films in full 1080p glory.

Then Bob and Harvey struck. Apparently the Weinsteins didn't like the idea of these films appearing in HD in Europe before they had been given such a release stateside, so the release date was pushed back and back and back again. Then, of course, the HD DVD ship capsized, with Blu-ray editions remaining on the schedule; however, with the likelihood of them being coded for Region B only, they obviously wouldn't be of much use to Region A people like myself. Anyway, to this day they still haven't come out.

Thankfully, The Weinstein Company has finally got off its fat ass and announced US Blu-ray releases of both films. As High-Def Digest reports, they will be released separately on December 16th. No specs have been revealed yet, but I would imagine that they will mirror the currently available standard definition DVDs in terms of content - in other words, they'll be the longer extended cuts, and Rodriguez's Planet Terror will be in its home video aspect ratio of 1.78:1 instead of its theatrical 2.39:1 (when paired up with Death Proof, it was reformatted to match the ratio of its stablemate). Currently, the Japanese 6-disc release from BroadMedia is the only way to see both films as they were shown in cinemas, and by the looks of it the picture quality on the theatrical version isn't too hot.

I'm rather looking forward to seeing these films again. I rented the DVD versions of both earlier this year (these days, I'm rather reluctant to buy standard definition copies of major studio films that stand a good chance of an HD release), and liked Planet Terror considerably better than Death Proof, which was Tarantino at his most annoyingly self-indulgent, with only the killer final half-hour redeeming it. I'm definitely interested to see how the intentionally grubby, scratched-up look translates to 1080p, having only seen them in SD so far.

Could you shake that camera a bit more, Mr. Bay?

At the time of its release, Transformers was the fastest selling film on any HD format, shifting 100,000 copies in its first day, for a total of 190,000 in the first week. As such, it's fair to say that this would be a large number of people's first introduction to high definition, so it's probably a good thing it looks as great as it does. That's not to say it's perfect: in terms of compression, the action-packed final half-hour is something of a struggle for the encoder, whether because of disc space or bandwidth limitations, but by and large it looks excellent. I suspect that it may have been pre-filtered just a teeny-tiny bit, but this is still a sterling effort from Paramount and one that would belong in every HD enthusiast's collection if the film itself wasn't such a heap of dung.

Transformers
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 25 GB)

The only waxiness here is in Rowan Atkinson's facial expressions

Mr. Bean's Holiday seems like a slightly odd choice for a day-and-date high definition release. Even stranger is how good it looks. If I were to use the words "demo material", you probably wouldn't normally expect me to utter this film's title in the same breath, but, honestly, I think I would. It has exactly the same look two other Universal 1.85:1 releases, Children of Men and Eastern Promises, and by that I mean that there is a small amount of filtering going on, resulting in a very slight loss of detail and some ringing, but nothing overly wondering. I wonder if Universal have two different algorithms for their day-and-date releases: one for 1.85:1 movies (slight filtering) and one for their 2.39:1 ones (no filtering). I'd have to investigate more 1.85:1 titles in order to be sure, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me at all.

Mr. Bean's Holiday
(Universal, UK, VC-1, 16.1 GB)

Things can get a little hazy in the Bayou

For a catalogue title from Universal, The Skeleton Key actually looks pretty decent, probably due to the fact that it was taken from a Digital Intermediate rather than Telecine source. It does look a little soft at times, but I'm inclined to attribute at least some of this to the way in which it was shot: it certainly has the "Panavision look", where things tend to appear smooth rather than pin-sharp. Certainly I don't see any of the ringing that normally shows up in Universal's filtered titles. Unfortunately, the image has at some stage been subjected to a fairly intensive noise reduction pass, sucking out the grain and resulting in some trailing artefacts. Still, as far as catalogue releases go, this is a pretty reasonable one, and one that I'm inclined to look upon more favourably in light of recent developments regarding Universal's Blu-ray ports.

The Skeleton Key
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 16.7 GB)

Universal mangles some more

A while back, I did a series of posts on some of Universal's particularly repugnant-looking catalogue HD DVD titles, in which I warned Blu-ray users that they had these transfers to look forward to when Universal began rolling out its back catalogue for the winning format. Unfortunately, it appears that I may have been a little premature with this statement. You see, it turns out that, far from simply porting over the same flawed encodes, Universal have, in some cases, taken the opportunity to go back and make them look worse.

I first got wind of this when I took a look at DVD Beaver's review of The Mummy on Blu-ray. The article features a number of full resolution 1920x1080 screen captures, which immediately struck me as quite a bit more waxy-looking than how I remembered the HD DVD, which I had briefly rented some months prior. Of course, memory can play funny tricks on you, but a little later, the proof arrived in the form of an image comparison by AV Science Forum member Xylon, whose screen captures are one of the main reasons I visit that forum and are worth more than a thousand text-based reviews. The difference may not be massive, but it's there: Universal have added further noise reduction for the Blu-ray release. The Mummy Returns shows a similar situation: again, the Blu-ray version is noticeably less grainy and more synthetic-looking than its HD DVD counterpart.

Finally, today's scandal involves U-571, once again released on Blu-ray by Universal with a vulgar level of noise reduction applied to it. The difference should be clear to even the most visually-impaired of viewers: the HD DVD (and its D-Theater counterpart) was hardly a stellar-looking disc, but the Blu-ray version looks positively alarming, sucking much of the grain out of the image and rendering it fake-looking and waxy. Predictably, the usual suspects have emerged from the woodwork to decry Xylon's findings. Unfortunately, whatever such individuals might attempt to claim, the pictures speak for themselves and reveal the truth that no amount of whitewashing or "it doesn't look like that on my screen" nonsense can hide.

In summary: as a rule, Universal treated their catalogue titles rather badly on HD DVD, and now they are making them look even worse on Blu-ray. What will it take to hammer it into these fools' heads that this sort of image degradation is neither necessary or wanted?

Is this the new Traffic?

Over the last few days, a veritable shitstorm has erupted on the Internet regarding Optimum's recent UK Blu-ray release of John Carpenter's Escape from New York. The word of mouth was that this was in fact nothing more than a standard definition upconvert. Comparative screen captures seemed to confirm this, indicating virtually no improvement in detail over the UK Special Edition DVD release (and a rather unpleasant green tint to boot).

Optimum were swift to rebuke these claims, stating, in an announcement posted at DVD Times, that

We at Optimum always try to provide our customers with the best possible quality video from the best source available to us. All our titles meet the required line count to qualify as 'High Definition', i.e. 1080p or 1080i. Contrary to reports on some fan forums, we have been assured by our supplier that the original source for the Blu-ray of Escape from New York is HD. We have not released and we will not release films on Blu-ray from masters we know to be up-scaled from SD PAL. The quality of HD masters of older films can vary and we are sorry if you are unhappy with the quality of picture on Escape From New York Blu-ray. Should a better master become available for this or any other Optimum title then we will endeavour to publish it as soon as feasible.

Unfortunately, the evidence, to my eyes, would seem to be stacked against Optimum. I'm sure they were indeed "assured by their supplier" that the master handed to them was HD. Unfortunately, their supplier is Studio Canal, whose track record, in either HD or SD, is not exactly a shining beacon of light. Further faecal matter hit the fan yesterday when pictures emerged of a version of the film that has been broadcast on HDNet, blowing the Optimum release out of the water.

To quote Lyris:

The BD release screen grabs posted look very much like a Digital Betacam tape (or other unadulterated standard definition source) that has been scaled to 1920x1080 then processed. That would explain the SLIGHT gain in detail on the BD: it's not been low-pass filtered like the DVD will have been prior to compression. Since Optimum have denied that this is the case, we'll just have to say it's a poor HD release.

One thing doesn't change though: the review scores that this has received at some sites are cause for concern.

So, is Escape from New York on Blu-ray the new Traffic? I can't be 100% sure, but what I do know is that it's one sorry-looking disc.

Gophers... I hate gophers

Source: DVD Times

In an announcement that has genuinely surprised me, it turns out that the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, will be getting Blu-ray release date-and-date with the DVD version after all. Previously, I opted not to get my hopes up, given that both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are both notorious for dragging their heels when it comes to allowing their films to be released on new formats. I'm sure most of you will remember when Lucas' Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out on VHS but not DVD. Likewise, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is currently Spielberg's only film to have been given an HD release, with Universal even going so far as to personally apologise to the director for announcing HD DVD releases of E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park without his "permission".

Anyway, it looks as if Paramount is really pushing the boat out for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, giving it a 2-disc Special Edition release packed with bonus content, all of it in HD. Oh, and being a Lucas production, it also carries THX certification. Big whoop.

Now come on, guys, hurry up with the original trilogy.

But... but... grain!

Paramount's HD DVD release of Babel features a stellar transfer (note: the MPEG-2 Blu-ray version is not reviewed here) which shows off the varied methods of photography to great effect. From the rough, 16mm Moroccan scenes to the 35mm anamorphic look of Tokyo, there's really nothing to complain about here barring some minor artefacting. Predictably, not all reviewers were quite so impressed, some of them labelling the abundant grain a "problem with the transfer" (morons), but I'll let you judge for yourselves using the images below.

Babel
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 25.8 GB)

Universal's House of Horrors: Part 3 of 3

Eventually, all good things must come to an end. This is the third and final part of my exposé into the seedier side of high definition transfers, concentrating on the less than savoury excretions steamrolled by Universal on to HD DVD. (See here and here for the previous instalments.) As I approached the end of the alphabet (I went through the discs alphabetically), I discovered something quite shocking: there are actually a couple of discs in this line-up which look pretty good! But let's not get ahead of ourselves...

 
Lost in Translation
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 14.6 GB)

More indistinct, middle-of-the-road bla that doesn't make me want to kill myself, but at the same time is the sort of disc I'd immediately hide if someone asked me to show them what the HD formats were capable of.

 
Red Dragon
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 19.9 GB)

What happened here? By some bizarre twist of fate, they actually managed to mint a pretty decent-looking copy of this film. The flaws on display here - ringing, mainly - probably came from the optical printing process rather than from any external meddling. I've thrown in some extra images this time round because it's actually reasonably pleasant to look at.

 
Seed of Chucky
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 14.5 GB)

"Inconsistent" is the order of the day here. This one alternates between really looking pretty close to excellent and smelling like last week's milk. Again, I've thrown in a few more pictures for this one, so you can get some idea of just how radically different the quality can be from one shot to the next.

Universal's House of Horrors: Part 2 of 3

Yesterday, we plumbed the depths of the depressingly underwhelming Being John Malkovich, the improbably soft Brokeback Mountain, and Cat People, one of the worst-looking discs released on either of the HD formats. Incidentally, yesterday, I told Blu-ray users that they had transfers like these to look forward to once Universal started rolling out its catalogue titles on the format, but it turns out I spoke too soon. Blu-ray already has a Cat People of its own: The Longest Day, from 20th Century Fox. Click here to see what happens when John Wayne has a nasty encounter with the grain-sucking machine.

 
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 17.3 GB)

Another big steaming lump of cack from Universal. What are they actually thinking?

 
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 19.7 GB)

This one is actually quite a bit better than the others, but still falls short of acceptable standards. Ample evidence of filtering is present at all times. Really, you need to compare this with the horrendous standard definition DVDs from Criterion and Universal before it even begins to look halfway passable.

 
The Game
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 23.6 GB)

Actually, you know what? I've seen a lot worse. At least this one still looks like film, albeit film of the rather murky, ill-defined variety. I could be wrong, but maybe this is just what the movie looks like? Either way, it's a hell of a lot more pleasant watch than Cat People.

Universal's House of Horrors: Part 1 of 3

All right, you're thinking, I've seen it all. I've marvelled at the exceptional level of detail in Spider-man 3, I've been wowed by the fantastic grain reproduction in Silent Hill, and I just can't imagine an image that looks more all-round perfect than Ratatouille. Well, gentle readers, I present tonight, for the viewing pleasure of the hardened technophile, an inside look at the other end of the spectrum: the transfers so repulsive that you'd actually go out of your way to make sure people didn't accidentally see them and somehow "get the wrong idea" about high definition. Over the course of the next three posts, I'll be delving into Universal's swamp of catalogue releases, and we'll be asking ourselves how some of these travesties actually made it out the front (or back) door in the first place.

Attention, BD fans: don't go celebrating the assimilation of Universal into the Blu-ray umbrella just yet. This is what you have to look forward to.

 
Being John Malkovich
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 18.9 GB)

To be fair, this is already a really dingy, unappealing film to look at, but it shouldn't look this bad.

 
Brokeback Mountain
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 21.1 GB)

This one isn't even a catalogue title, so why in the name of all that is pleasant does it look like this? Nincompoop reviewers talk about the amazing landscapes on display as if that somehow means the transfer is any good.

 
Cat People
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 19 GB)

This one looks like someone took a giant dump on the disc stamper and then had it pressed. People won't actually believe an HD transfer can look this awful until you show it to them. This is pretty much as bad as it gets.

I can't see a goddamn thing, Jim!

The Kingdom on HD DVD is an example of what I would call the second tier of Universal's HD output. At the very top, you have titles like The Bourne Ultimatum and King Kong: recent releases which, barring any instances of compression artefacts, are as perfect as HD gets. There's no sign of filtering, edge enhancement, noise reduction or any other unwanted tampering. Then you get titles like Mr. Bean's Holiday and Eastern Promises, which still look very good, and appear to have come from excellent sources, but which introduce a layer of digital manipulation, usually a light sheen of filtering.

In the case of The Kingdom, there is clear evidence of ringing, particularly visible in the first shot. This is the thin, sharp, high frequency type usually associated with straight edge enhancement rather than the thicker, blurrier sort you get with filtering, so my theory is that someone sharpened this transfer. The fact that the credits text is also affected shows that this took place at the very end of or after the DI process: in other words, the editor wasn't simply being fed a bunch of pre-sharpened footage. (Sometimes you'll get transfers where the film-based material has been tampered with but the credits themselves are problem-free.) Theoretically speaking, therefore, it should be possible, one day, to go back to the source and get a "clean" master.

Trying the get clear screen captures of this disc was tough given the nature of the camerawork. The film was produced by Michael Mann, and the director, Peter Berg, seems to have attempted to replicate his, ahem, style by constantly shaking the camera around like a stoned monkey. The result is that the whole film is essentially one long jittery zip pan, so I found myself limited to the more serene, static moments, which are few and far between. Broadly speaking, it looks better in motion, although it does tend to make you feel seasick. Did I mention I hate this look?

The Kingdom
(Universal, UK, VC-1, 18.6 GB)

HD Image Quality Rankings updated

I've performed some updates on the HD Image Quality Rankings page, moving several 8/10-rated titles down into the 7/10 bracket. Among these are several of the more noticeably filtered Warner titles, along with such disappointments as The Simpsons Movie and Sony's somewhat unjustly lauded re-release of The Fifth Element. Two titles have also been pulled out of the prestigious 10/10 category and moved into the still highly impressive 9.5/10: Silent Hill, for having slightly elevated blacks (which can be corrected using the brightness control on your display, which you shouldn't really have to do), and King Kong, for some minor compression artefacts.

It's something of an indication of how good the best high definition transfers look that I am actually currently in a position of having to demote less impressive transfers. I consider this to be very good progress, given that, for the most part, even the best-looking standard definition DVDs were still heavily flawed.

Get 'em while they're still lukewarm

I know I said I wouldn't buy any more, but with the silly prices HD DVDs are going for in various stores, I thought it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity to pick up some mega-cheap titles. HMV.co.uk is currently selling off a whole bunch of titles for as little as £4.99 each, a steal when you consider the AV quality of some of them. I snagged King Kong, The Kingdom and Stardust, all of which popped through my letterbox this morning.

I watched The Kingdom this evening. An eye-pleasing transfer from Universal - not one of their best, but, when you consider how dreadful some of their releases look, particularly their catalogue titles, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Actually, barring a small amount of ringing, it actually looks very nice, with a very pleasing amount of detail and commendably little artefacting, despite the amount of fast cutting and shakycam on display. I also found it a rather interesting film too, at least until it decided to abandon its loftier aims and turn into an old fashioned Men & Guns™ car chase/shoot-out extravaganza. That, and the constantly jittering camera made me feel fairly seasick.