Got The Dark Knight on Blu-ray on Monday. I was slightly disappointed by the picture quality, with certain scenes receiving extra edge enhancement/sharpening and some scenes which would have benefited from such processing, were a blurry mess. That said, those faults don’t spoil what is a fantastic film with great characters and set pieces. Heck, they even saw fit to throw in the scenes shot in IMAX as part of the main feature too. I kinda wish the entire movie was shot in IMAX now because the difference in picture quality is astounding due to the resolution (70mm vs 35mm). The extras are also good, if few in number, with a psychology of Batman feature really standing out.
Also picked up Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 on Blu-ray as part of an HMV offer. Not such a great picture here though it could be argued that it’s down to Tarantino’s visual style. Much better than the DVDs which never upscaled well on my Samsung DVD player. Oh, and where’s my Pulp Fiction in HD?? Get it out, Miramax!
All of these are being run through my new Sony 32 inch 1080p screen, which was meant to be a Chrimbo present for my parents. I saw it on sale in Debenhams with a free 5 year warranty and duly snapped it up. My folks have been harping on about moving over to an HD set for the last year or so and since they watch so much TV, I figured this would be an ideal pressie. So, I get it into my Yaris (a highly comical feat) and get it home to them. I present it to them with a huge grin on my face and they give you that ‘thank you, but no thank you’ look. They say that they don’t need such an advanced HDTV and suggest I take it and they have my old Samsung HDTV. I was between minds whether to actually take the Sony or not because I was more than happy with my Samsung, and I already have a helluva lot of AV equipment hooked up to it. So, I begrudgingly took the Sony and began setting it up. Wowoweewow, the picture quality is a huge step up from the Samsung. There’s no dead pixels whereas there were 3 on the Samsung, and the contrast ratio is much higher at 30,000 : 1 compared to 8,000 : 1. I can’t say I notice a significant difference between a 720p picture and a 1080p one, but then I can’t really make a true side by side comparison. The features are also much better than the Samsung, with the ability to edit out unused connections like RGB scart and composite, allowing for cycling through active connections to be much faster.
I knew I should have never gone with Samsung!
