I heard it's more Favreau setting shit straight than Filoni but whatever. Like, Lucasfilm should have a restraining order from Rian ever approaching anything related to it.īut hey, no, let's give him more after what he did to Last Jedi. It's as real looking as the ruby slippers in the movie.I wish Rian Johnson stayed at least 100 miles away from anything Star Wars. I'll tell you what, I really appreciated the film grain here.
In other words, this 8K restoration is incredible for presenting what's baked into the film, but what's baked into the movie isn't always top-flight by today's standards, which again, is a bit of a "Duh! It's 1939! Don't expect The Revenant." The better the reproduction from the original film, the more the warts are apparent, as well as the glory. I'm not saying that the transfer isn't a marvel - it is! - only, since I'm new to 4K it's becoming apparent that 4K can bring out the best and the worst in PQ. I guess that soft look is simply a product of the technology of the time, yeah? I watched it on my new LG 77" C1 that has been calibrated by one of the best, playing it through the Panasonic UB820 player. While it's the best this film has looked, and the Dolby Vision color pallette is very respectful of the original Technicolor, bringing out the best in 1930s technology, I was a little disappointed (and I guess I should have known) in the softness of the majority of the film. I watched the 80th anniversary UHD disc of The Wizard of Oz last night, taken from this 8K scan. IMO there's no real risk in jumping to 4K unless you have a lot of DVD content. That said, many Blu-Rays still look great upscaled to 4K as well, nowhere near as bad as DVDs looked in the HD era. It can't replace 4K disc, but I usually find it preferable to Blu-Ray. A vast majority of 4K content is digital-only, and the compression on the better platforms like iTunes and Vudu has gotten really good.
Still my biggest recommendation for anyone moving to 4K is to get an Apple TV 4K or NVIDIA Shield. There's a pretty decent library of titles now on UHD disc too, catalog titles like this are coming out all the time, as well as new releases. You can use sites like RTINGs to parse out which displays are closest to reference level.Īs for discs, I'd also say yes, they're the best PQ by far and, it's not that high of a barrier of entry, at $175ish for the Sony X-700 player, which I would recommend (although some folks have had some freezing issues, I've had none). I would invest a lot into the display so you are getting the best PQ and HDR experience you can. Also the demographic concerns.Ĭlick to expand.If you're not into 4K HDR at all, I think now would be a decent time to make the jump, unless you're a gamer who needs all that new HDMI 2.1 stuff which hasn't fully rolled out. I do not think too many cinephile purists have gone all in on 4K yet, so we're stuck with a crowd that doesn't care as much as you might think they do. When you've got a format dominated by people who are into home theater for the wiz-bang-boom aspect, you're catering to a crowd that values surround and HDR impact over theatrical accuracy.
All three of those skew away from the central demographic of home theater, which is sort of my other point here. Plenty of movies get cancelled for stateside disc release ( Parasite, Little Women, Midsommar from last year). There's so many cases of theatrical Atmos mixes not being on UHD discs but on digital, or Dolby Vision not being on disc but being on digital even on contemporary films.Īt this rate we're lucky to get films on UHD disc.
What we're left with is a format with a very small install base that's more expensive to manufacture, so very little effort is being put into the format even by the major players. Most average people who made the jump to 4K HDR have stuck with digital where the library is way bigger and cheaper. The players are expensive and the format hasn't been adopted by any major gaming console yet (supposedly PS5 will). Then the same thing happened with dynamic metadata, where DV was adopted quickly by Netflix and Apple but took ages to make its way to disc, and still doesn't have a large library. For one, it took too long to launch compared with digital options. If we wanted to explore why the sales are low, UHD disc was always sort of DOA, and despite having some growth, very few people adopted it. Click to expand.I think low sales = low effort.