If there’s one fact we’ve learned in our dealings with the PR industry it’s this: it’s tough to put on a launch event championing the features included on special edition DVDs. The only option, when you collect a group of journalists together to show them something, is to hire out a screening room and project the DVD onto the big screen.
And it’s on the big screen that the format, while suitable for most early 21st Century homes, really shows its weaknesses. In our time we’ve been to launch events for Paramount’s Star Trek boxed-sets, War of the Worlds and the James Bond Ultimate Collection – the latter, in particular, touting the brilliance with which the films have been re-mastered and transferred.
But on a screen larger than forty inches, DVD’s cracks start to appear. The image becomes pixelated and the compression techniques mean subtle gradients look like ugly blocks of colour. Even with great care and attention devoted to re-mastering classics and transferring big-budget effects movies, on the big screen DVD just can’t compare to film.
The Big-Screen Experience
A month ago Rotten Tomatoes UK were invited to Sony’s London headquarters to watch Casino Royale on Blu-Ray disc. When we arrived we were summoned to their private screening room in the basement and as we took our seats our hearts began to sink – a home entertainment format projected onto a screen this size?
But the quality we saw in 1080p high definition astounded us. We’ve seen film projected in everything from private screening rooms to premieres and little has matched the clarity and detail level we saw in Casino Royale on Blu-Ray. Indeed, we could only find comparable results in the full-blown digital projection we saw at the premieres of Star Wars Episode III and Cars.
Later, at Sony’s 3-Rooms brand space in North London, we’re treated to a demo showing us the Casino Royale Blu-Ray disc playing side-by-side with the Casino Royale digital master – the version from which every print of the film has originated – on dual 50-inch LCD TVs.
One of the earliest examples of Sony’s dual-layered 50GB Blu-Ray discs, Casino Royale employs compression techniques that have only just been developed and its similarity to the source film suggests that things can only get better for the format.
Picture Heights
For the best part of two years we’ve been encouraged by retailers to become “HD-Ready” and that buying a television without this mark is proof-positive of our ultimate obsolescence. They were half right. We’re introduced to Don Eklund, Executive Vice President of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s Advanced Technologies division who explains to Rotten Tomatoes the true benefits of HD pictures and sound.
As it turns out, the average standard definition signal is transmitted to a television no larger than 32 inches which places us seven picture-heights (that is the height from the bottom of the screen to the top, obviously) away from the TV in a standard-sized living room.
HD, however, is optimised for display at three picture-heights. What this means, in practice, is that side-by-side your eyes will have trouble resolving the difference between standard definition and high definition at seven picture-heights from the TV. As you get closer your eyes are able to resolve the added detail until, at three picture-heights, you’re experiencing HD at its full potential.
So the message here is, bigger is better. We’re certainly not encouraging you to sit closer to the screen, it’s simply that the larger the screen you’re using, the shorter your picture-height distance from it, and the most benefit you’ll gain from Blu-Ray.
This, we argue, should lead to a boom in HD projector sales, for it’s finally become viable to replicate a cinema experience in the home with Blu-Ray. Combined with a comfy chair and a powerful speaker system, it’s now possible not just to approximate the big-screen environment in the home but to match it. And considering the quality of film projection in most cinemas these days, one could even argue that it’s possible to best it.
Cost
Of course, this brings us neatly back to the cost angle of getting started with Blu-Ray. 40″ screens and 720p projectors sit just this side of £1000 to start with, and atop that you’d have to place the cost of a speaker system and, of course, a Blu-Ray player. Replicating the cinema experience is a wonderful idea in theory but to do so requires a serious investment that’s beyond the reach of the average consumer.
The answer may be to simply invest in stages, and if that’s the case we suggest starting with the display and sound devices, thereby allowing the competing formats to battle it out for a while. Early adopters, and the super-rich, may wish to dive into the purchase of a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player but while the cost remains prohibitive we’re willing to wager that, sales figures aside, the battle between the two formats looks set to rage for a while and we’re not entirely closed to the possibility that there will be no victor at all.
Of course, if you’ve considered a PlayStation 3-sized hole in your budget this month, far be it from us to stop you; you’ll see plenty of benefit from the console and you’ll have a Blu-Ray player thrown right in…
But what of the Blu-Ray catalogue? In the final part of our guide we’ll be comparing the list of Blu-Ray titles currently available against our world-famous Tomatometer and providing our list of the top ten Blu-Ray movies on store shelves.
