Blueray, I'm not keen

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axisusaxisus Frets: 28280
I've never gone the Blueray route. Partially because the products cost more, but mainly because I didn't like the clinical look of the very few things I've seen on that medium.

I saw the film Equilibrium at my brothers house and I HATED the look of it. It was very crisp and clean but it just looked horribly fake to me, like cheap studio lighting. I didn't much enjoy the film as I couldn't get absorbed into it, the lighting was just too off putting. I have since seen some of it on regular DVD type quality and it looks so much better to me.

At my sisters house I saw Ponyo on Blueray, and likewise I didn't like it. It's a superb film but the clarity made it really obvious that they were hand drawn/pencilled backgrounds with animation film on top. I've seen it many times on DVD and NEVER noticed that at all. The 'blended' look is so much better to me.

The one thing that I am wondering if it is better - I have various old concert DVDs, Satch, Vai, Rush etc and I don't really care to watch them much now as they just look wooly and fuzzy. I'm wondering if those sort of things look better on Blueray? I'm guessing they might, but only with more recent footage maybe?

Anyone else not a fan?





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Comments

  • LodiousLodious Frets: 1942
    edited April 2021
    I think bluray looks really good, the issues you have seen are probably because of the motion processing enabled on the TV. If you turn it all off, it should look great. 
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  • mrkbmrkb Frets: 6635
    edited April 2021
    If I find Blu-ray too sharp, I just take my specs off, then it looks like the worst VHS pirate copy I’ve ever seen. 
    Karma......
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  • monquixotemonquixote Frets: 17485
    tFB Trader
    It's not just you.

    In some cases they apply processing to Blu-rays to make them look more like people expect 4k to look

    One example was Pan's Labyrinth which was deliberately filmed on very grungy grainy film stock to have a certain look. The Blu-ray had loads of sharpening filters applied to it which stripped all the grain out.
    The director was apparently furious when he saw it.
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  • wibblewibble Frets: 1083
    It depends a lot on the capabilities and settings of your TV
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  • thecolourboxthecolourbox Frets: 9654
    It's good for animated films though I find
    Please note my communication is not very good, so please be patient with me
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  • Agree,   4K and bluray can overpower the senses.. too much detail. You get dropped out of the narrative analysing the pores on their cast’s faces.   

    The OTT colour grading is often awful too to go with it.  
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  • prowlaprowla Frets: 4896
    It could be upsampling.
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  • phil_bphil_b Frets: 2010
    With streaming available it is probably an obsolete medium or soon will be
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  • stickyfiddlestickyfiddle Frets: 26742
    edited April 2021
    A huge proportion of transfers to BR and 4K were done really badly - that’s usually what is going on if you don’t like it. 

    Massive amounts of unnecessary sharpening and really bad colour “correction” which was basically just turning contrast and saturation sliders up
    The Assumptions - UAE party band for all your rock & soul desires
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  • If your TV can handle 24p Blu Ray can be really impressive. 
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  • beed84beed84 Frets: 2403
    I love Blu-Ray, but it does help having a quality display set correctly to fully appreciate it.
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  • scrumhalfscrumhalf Frets: 11262
    A huge proportion of transfers to BR and 4K were done really badly - that’s usually what is going on if you don’t like it. 

    Massive amounts of unnecessary sharpening and really bad colour “correction” which was basically just turning contrast and saturation sliders up
    A cynic might suggest that this was done so that "better" re-issues can be released in a few years to make a bit more money.

    Naughty, naughty cynic. 
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  • RaymondLinRaymondLin Frets: 11799
    I got that feeling when I first got my 4k oled, there is a term for it, it's call the Soap Opera effect.  Everything too clear, it doesn't look like a movie that you are used as it looks too much like real life.

    But you will get used to it and your brain be able to tell the little differences again.
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  • Philly_QPhilly_Q Frets: 22514
    In a lot of the early Blu-ray releases they used older masters and applied various "sharpening" tools like edge enhancement, and digital noise reduction techniques which removed the film grain and made the images look smeary and horrible.  Universal Studios were particularly notorious for some of their releases, like Predator and Patton.

    Other studios used the same masters they'd used for DVD and the higher resolution just exposed the flaws.

    But they have got much better.  Most films nowadays have been shot digitally anyway so they don't need to fuck about with them at all to transfer them to Blu-ray or 4K.  And older films are being remastered, in many cases with 4K scans but failing that with better 2K scans.

    With things like your old concert videos, how good they'll look on Blu-ray depends on the quality of the source.  If they were shot on videotape, like old TV shows, they'll still look like videotape.
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  • LodiousLodious Frets: 1942
    Agreed, and it's not just blurays, some of the 4K streaming quality can also be nasty. That said, a lot of people make it worse by having their TV's setup like it's in a sports bar. If you turn off pretty much all the 'enhancements' you should be able to get really nice quality for watching films on and half decent TV, TV's apply sharpening in real time, and if you crank the settings up, it's possible to make anything look horrible.

    I'd say the majority of the TV's I see in people homes look awful as they have them set to standard or vivid with motion smoothing enabled. Nothing worse than having to pretend that a TV looks great when people are showing off their new TV's with picture settings that looks like the instore demos in Currys. 
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  • RaymondLinRaymondLin Frets: 11799
    Oh yes, forgot about that, you need to turn off all enhancement settings that the TV comes with from the factory.  All motion, sharpness etc, turn all of them off.  Also, if you google your TV model and look for best setting to use.  If you have money you can get it professionally calibrated but at minimum you need to adjust settings, it might be change from Normal to Natural or Movies.
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  • DefaultMDefaultM Frets: 7271
    Black Panther was the first 4K film I watched and I thought it looked awful. Then I turned off motion processing and the next ones have all looked okay. I haven't watched Black Panther again though to check that.
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  • exocetexocet Frets: 1947
    I thought that Blueray was only 1080p ie “standard HD”? What else is there that’s better to watch at home other than streamed 4K? 
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  • Philly_QPhilly_Q Frets: 22514
    edited April 2021
    exocet said:
    I thought that Blueray was only 1080p ie “standard HD”? What else is there that’s better to watch at home other than streamed 4K? 
    You can also get 4K Ultra HD discs.  2160p.  But of course you have to have a suitable TV and player, and the range of titles is fairly limited.  That said, the range of titles on streaming services is pretty limited too.   
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  • LodiousLodious Frets: 1942
    exocet said:
    I thought that Blueray was only 1080p ie “standard HD”? What else is there that’s better to watch at home other than streamed 4K? 
    I’m not an expert, but I don’t think It’s as simple as that, as resolution isn’t the only property which affects image quality. There is a lot more information on a 1080 Blu-ray than a 4k streamed movie, and while the encoding algorithm used for the stream may be better than the one used for the Blu-ray, there is a lot more compression on the streamed 4K. We watched a 4K stream of the Pirates of the Caribbean on iTunes a while back and some of the image quality was terrible, I think because of the amount of data compression to get a 4K movie into a stream a tenth of the size of a Blu-ray.
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