Ghostbusters Blu-Ray Review Notes
I completely disagree with the statements about the picture quality of the Blu-ray. I have every single release of the film on DVD and the Blu-ray. I also have a 40″ 1080p HDTV from Samsung and a Panasonic Blu-ray Player, as well as a 52″ 1080p HDTV from Samsung with another Panasonic Blu-ray player. On both, the Blu-ray looks far better than any of the previous DVD releases. Personally, I wonder what type of panel your HDTV has that is displaying it so horribly. Both of mine have Samsung panels, while Samsung, and other companies, will also use panels created by other companies. The calibration of your TV will also make a big difference as well as the quality of the Blu-ray player’s output.
A couple of things:
The grain:
Grain issues are harder to get around with the higher the resolution. Most of the grain get lost when you shrink your Master image (most likely scanned at 2K) to PAL/NTSC. The high res of Bluray keep all that info. Grain management is harder to master. As an example look at the huge grain issues the first 007: Casino Royale had despite been a very recent movie.
On older movies it’s even harder because you have to add the quality of the old film to the equation. That being said, I believe that they could have filtered the image more to remove a lot of it. You could also use your video card drivers built-in noise removal option to help out.
Despite that I still prefer the Hi def image to the DVD, details are much higher. I wish they would have kept the color grade of the original DVD, though the Bluray is improved over the awful 2005 release. (no more green streams on Slimer!)
Slimer Mode:
That’s the big twinky of the BluRay, however I find that despite a couple of new tidbits, it’s mostly the same stuff as the commentary and featurettes of 1999 retold in a nicer way.
Of course that’s my two cents
I’m basing my opinion of the picture quality difference between the Blu-Ray and the 1999 DVD on what I’ve witnessed by comparing the actual digital frames on each disc, not what is outputted to my television. It’s what’s shown on my Home Video Image Comparison page.
Taking a look at the #2 image “Shocking The Nerd”, even scaled down to DVD resolution, you can see a lot of grain in the dark areas of the Blu-Ray picture that aren’t present in the other two images. So if the print used for the 1999 DVD were as grainy, I think that it would have still been noticeable in the downscaled DVD picture. That’s the point I was trying to make.
Still, the grain present on the Blu-Ray takes a back seat to the colors just being too bright and whites being overblown. You can also see this on my comparison page. Like Raffon, I also wish that they would have kept the color grade of the 1999 DVD. That’s why I prefer the overall look of the 1999 DVD, but appreciate the high-resolution picture of the Blu-Ray.
Either way you look at it, I think we’re all in agreement that the 2005 DVD (the green slime cover) should be avoided at all costs 🙂
To show you that I wasn’t lying when I said that the “limited time offers” PC Richards and 6th Ave. were advertising weren’t so limited, here’s the week-long sale 6th Ave. is having this week, as advertised in yesterday’s (3/14) circular:
So much for it being a “Saturday [3/13] Only” sale, huh?
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