bobfells wrote:Gaucho wrote:Can anyone who has the BD comment on the picture quality?
Bob?
I watched the first 30 minutes of WHM this morning while on my treadmill. Watching films on the treadmill is a great antidote to the dread malady of film buffs - couch potato-itis (aka big rear-end syndrome). But I digress. I am happy to report that Grapevine Video has hit a home run right out of the park! The image quality is stunning in Blu-ray so I have to assume it is also excellent in regular DVD. And I watched it on my big screen TV, not my PC monitor. Even the needle-drop vintage orchestral score seems synchronized with the picture. This is like seeing this film for the first time if you've only seen the washed out edition with all details blasted white. Even the opening scenes with an unbilled Eugene Pallette that seemed rather slow work much better now.
Bottom line - run, don't walk, to your PC and order this one!
Thanks for following up on this, Bob. I placed an order last week, so my anticipation of this title has been upped as well. Gaucho should have no reservations about purchasing this given your stellar review. For a $5 fee over the DVD-R price, the BD-R seems to me like a no-brainer. Besides PQ, from a longevity standpoint BD-R
should exceed DVD-R by many years.
Note: If Grapevine were to select their most popular titles (with decent PQ) for BD-R release ...perhaps upgrading with a modest amount of clean-up and/or restoration where needed... they could have a significant impact on the collector market. Doing a little research into BD-R progress over the past 10 years, recent price drops in recordable BD media may have motivated Grapevine in this direction. I applaud their perceptiveness!
One caveat ...and I'm not singling out Grapevine for this..., I wish all PD film services utilizing DVD-R or BD-R technology would clearly disclose it. It's possible that some folks might be hesitant buying on demand write-once media, but given the relative obscurity of many silent films I suspect that resistance to recordable medium wouldn't amount to a hill of beans for any collector.
