“Real talk:” Like so many of you, I had looked forward to the PlayStation 5 for several months prior to its late fall release, and upon its late fall release, I followed a Twitter account that kept track of the stores that had it in stock (where it would stay in stock for nanosecond), I kept open tabs at Target, Best Buy, B&H, and the Sony store, and then made it a point not to “drive myself mad” by refreshing those pages constantly. Concurrent to these efforts, I began looking into 4K Ultra Blu-rays, excited (well, mildly excited) about experiencing this not-entirely-new high-definition format.
Another thing that happened in late fall is that our household took delivery of a credenza to hold our television display and electronics playback equipment. A really beautiful piece of furniture; all credit goes to My Lovely Wife Claire who commissioned it. Migrating some electronics from the mediocre-man-cave-ready vertical unit that had been mine since before getting married, it occurred to me that my setup was moderately absurd. Of course I had my beloved OPPO machine, ostensibly an all-region player that was locked on Region B for reasons I needn’t go into here. This was , alas, starting to turn obsolescent because certain labels were making Blu-rays whose bitrate went beyond what the OPPO could actually handle. This concern could be handled with a firmware update — were OPPO still a going concern that provided firmware updates for its hardware, which it’s not. In 2019 I got a super-cheap LG all-region player that was so small as to be practically portable. I think for the purpose of bringing it to this house upstate that we and some friends were renting for the Thanksgiving holiday. So that played the high-bitrate Region Bs (the first was the Eureka/Masters of Cinema Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, a handsome item indeed; and more often than not the discs from Powerhouse/Indicator have that maxed-out bitrate, even the Fu Manchu titles you’d think wouldn’t’ have enough inherent information to support such a thing, ar ar ar). And it functioned as a proper region-free player all around. So why keep the OPPO? Sentimental value, perhaps (God I’m an idiot) but also it functioned as a Super Audio CD Player, which neither the LG nor the PS4 did. Nor, I understood, would the PS5. Yes, it would play 4K Ultra discs but the CD option was one and it was plain.
Now as we know, during the 2020 holiday season, and indeed this holds of today, a PS5 was almost impossible to get. So as I refreshed my Walmart and Target and Sony tabs, and looked at the beautiful new credenza and thought that despite its capaciousness its look could benefit if every nook and cranny wasn’t supporting equipment, and I faced the fact that I had not actually attached a VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER to the PS4 in eleven years. So why was I buying a PS5, or rather, not buying a PS5 but driving myself semi-nuts waiting to buy a PS5?
So I went to B&H (the website, dummy), did a little research, and lo and behold, found a Sony UBP-X800E 4K player, modified for all-region playback. As America’s favorite club kid Stefon would say, this player has everything. Up-to-date all-region playback at the push of a button. 4K Ultra of course. A variety of media server options. Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube access built in. AND it plays back Super Audio CDs. God is good. I packed up the PS4, controller, and the dozen games I had and shipped them to a favorite nephew (not so much for his entertainment as for that of his four kids [Jesus!]), put away the LG for Future Use While Traveling Maybe, and brought the OPPO to the electronics graveyard. And began to gorge on 4K physical media. The below capsules chronicle my earliest explorations. Future physical media Consumer Guides, if they happen at all (I mean, I assume they will, but their frequency is particularly open to question these days) will incorporate 4K discs and of course identify themselves. 4Ks are region-free by definition, by the way. Fun. For the purposes of this exercise I’ve given separate grades for movies and image.
EQUIPMENT: Sony UBP-X800E 4K Ultra BR player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver, bitchin’ speakers, a really nice credenza.
The Beastmaster (Vinegar Syndrome)
Some of this looks incredibly close to what you might have seen in a theater, had you been lucky enough to see this in a theater back in 1982. Remember, despite this being “schlock,” it was lit and shot by John Alcott. He’s good. 10 minutes in and the action shots are incredible in texture and dimensionality of image. The whole thing is lots of fun. Side note: Amazing that talents like Don Coscarelli, who have a genuine feel for pulp (and ability to transpose it to film) have to make their movies guerilla style while Marvel/Disney hands franchise after franchise to fake humanist comedians with near-zero visual sense looking for a big payday. What a world. Movie: A Image: A+
Beverly Hills Cop (Paramount)
Coming to America (Paramount)
Up until now I’ve never seen either of these ostensible classics in full. Not because I boycotted — I think Eddie Murphy is funny, and I like John Landis movies more than a person of my moral caliber really ought — but just because I never got around to them. As Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” played under the opening credits of Beverly Hills Cop, though, I got a bit of an idea why. Miss me with this Glenn Frey shit, dude. Especially with his white bread stylings playing over a montage of poor persons of color, as we prepare to meet the legendary Axel Foley. The movie is relatively smooth sailing after that, though. Based on multiple glimpses of individual scenes on cable, I expected Cop to be an over-lit day mare. Instead it looks like a picture shot by Bruce Surtees, which it is. Yay! Not a bad movie, but it’s no 48 Hrs. “The super cop story…was working” bit, with Murphy in his underrated quiet mode, is particularly hilarious. As for Coming to America: Hey! The production designer Richard MacDonald did all those Losey movies too. Whoa. As for the rest of the movie, it generally toggles between Comic Genius Operating On All Cylinders and Look Ma, No Story Editor! The image quality is really great. It’s almost palpable how badly the Waldorf needs a thorough sandblasting in 1998.
Beverly Hills Cop: Movie: B- Image: A+
Coming to America: Movie: B Picture: A+
The Big Lebowski (Universal)
I always considered the Blu-ray better than watchable. It’s only when doing an A/B comparison of BR and 4K that you can understand why it’s relatively poor representation of the movie. On its own, the BR looks bright, clean, smooth, somewhat digitized but not too creamy. The 4K is like the windshield has been squeegeed — better detail, less digital brightness in the interiors, a more subtly varied color palette, revealing the BR as WAY TOO creamy. 4K is definitely the way to go here.
Movie and Image: A+
Blade (Warner)
Here’s another one I’ve never seen before. I like the image. One thing 4K brings to the table is really great blacks, and you can sure bet on them here. Ar ar ar. Back in the day, one video nightmare was deep reds on a black field, but check out the opening titles here, they really work. Unfortunately the movie is kind of goofy, I found. Snipes manages to ham it up while maintaining a stone face, and all the martial arts moves are corny. I’ll see what Del Toro got up to with Blade II, but I’m not encouraged. Also this movie dispenses with Traci Lords too quickly. Phooey.
Movie: B- Image: A
Collateral (Paramount)
Pretty remarkable looking. The L.A.-by-night-in-high-def look, a postmodern noir idea for sure, is a gas. I didn’t really like it the first time I saw it, and I had to sit through a whole bunch of SHITTY SHOT-ON-DIGITAL MOVIES to really appreciate it. (Don’t ask me to list them. I saw a lot of them at Sundance I think.) The bleary semi-softness is the key — it’s like the colors are still wet, and if you wiped your hand over the screen they’d come off on your palm. Mann and cinematographers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron use this quality for some startling effects, including the silvery near-monochrome of the Metro Rail finale. More digital Mann on 4K, please. The movie’s solid, filled with bravura sequences and little funny touches that only happen in Mann World, like when Barry Shabaka Henry’s character saying “You ain’t shit when you’re playin’ next to Miles Davis” when just minutes before he was miming playing to the ACTUAL RECORDING of Davis’s “Spanish Key.” And Cruise is great, and more likable here as a sociopathic assassin than he is in a movie considered below.
Movie A- Image: A+
Crash (Arrow)
This is also a U.S. Criterion Blu-ray, with a superb picture and some excellent extras, including a perceptive Jessica Kiang essay and a Cronenberg commentary from the first DVD release a long time ago. The rather more elaborate Arrow release is the same Peter Suschitzky-supervised and Cronenberg approved transfer. Only in 4K, its native resolution. So what’s the difference? Well the Arrow audio is a little louder as the default. It’s a visually fascinating film, from the very beginning: the travelling shot into the airplane hangar where Deborah Kara Unger’s character is having her assignation looks like it’s in black-and-white until the camera rises and there’s a red-striped plane in the frame. Watching the Criterion version, you will certainly not feel deprived. But a 4K transfer in actual 4K is its own reward, and this edition has that. It also has a 1971 short film by J.G. Ballard himself, two excellent latter-day shorts from Cronenberg, and a whole book of essays and interviews. It’s a lot and the movie warrants it. So much so that if you can swing it, you ought to own both versions. But if you have a 4K player, this one should be a priority. And I understand the dearth of art films on 4K is for a reason — most investors in the hardware tend to be mavens of blockbuster and/or genre stuff, which is certainly reflected in the nature of most of the titles considered here.
Movie and Image: A+
Daughters of Darkness (Blue Underground)
Speaking of genre stuff, this moody, slinky 1971 film from the very (delightfully) odd Harry Kümel is art-film adjacent (the lead is a fabulously swanning Delphine Seyrig) is an erotic horror jewel for the whole family. The BR was good, but this has a definite boost in clarity — scenes bathed in a particular color (the lavender in the opening train lovemaking sequence for instance) — are not overwhelmed by that color. Makes me drool at the prospect of 4K Bava, frankly. And again, what a faboo movie. How can you not love a picture whose script features the phrase “sinister deserted caravanserai?”
Movie and image: A+
Dawn of the Dead (Second Sight)
A supreme masterpiece gets a supreme home video treatment. Three discs with three cuts of the 1978 Romero film, and CDs of the various soundtracks too, and a book of essays and interviews. The cuts are Romero’s U.S. theatrical, the “extended cut” (not a director’s cut but a longer version that played at Cannes and was trimmed by the director for release),and co-producer Dario Argento’s European cut (called Zombi, which is why Lucio Fulci’s film was in some markets called Zombi 2, or II, or what have you), which is shorter than the U.S. theatrical. My preferred cut is Argento’s, largely because it has the most Goblin music. But also because it’s fleet and grisly without losing any of the points Romero was making. The extended cut feels more like a “sequel” to Night of the Living Dead, because it’s score is completely library music, like the score of Night was. It’s the power of suggestive association so to speak. It’s also filled with bits, some of which don’t work all that well (for instance, the attempted hijacking of the chopper at the beginning). The theatrical cut mixes library and Goblin music and is the one you and I grew up with (I was still under 20 when it came out, totally counts). I watched all three over the course of a couple of weeks and didn’t feel at all put out or dutiful, that must say something. The new restoration is gorgeous, really puts across the thoughtfulness Romero put into this color film. Scorsese tells a story of trying to rent a print of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann way back in the day and finding out it was in Romero’s temporary possession. You can see that movie’s influence in the opening TV studio scenes if you look carefully enough. Anyway. Essential.
Movie and image: A+
Flash Gordon (Arrow)
This mops up the floor with the Universal BR in terms of color value and detail. And the BR could not be called bad by any means. But it’s over 8 years old. Going back to the movie, which I sometimes had a rather dismissive attitude towards, I was delighted to see how much loving Méliès tribute it contains, among other things. And that, for all the Camp and faux-Camp elements it contains, director Mike Hedges keeps a pretty straight, if you’ll pardon the expression, face while staging and shooting some of the suspense set pieces, like Barin and Flash facing off in the hollow-stump ritual thingie. As other reviewers have mentioned, the magnificent detail shows off some visible matte lines, but visible matte lines ain’t no crime. Movie A- image A+
Gremlins (Warner)
A real improvement from the Blu-ray, right off the bat. On the earlier edition, in the opening scenes, the flushness in Hoyt Axton’s face, for instance, had something of a dupey look. The 4K smooths things out, gives the image a real boost in the “film look” department. Less of a “telecine” quality, let’s say. It’s lower key but still vivid and color, with skin tones more realistic. Movie: A Image: A+
It’s A Wonderful Life (Paramount)
I was half expecting a cream-colored digital nightmare. This is not that…but it’s not ideal either. Not by a long shot. The ice sledding scene has this shine to it that’s a weird contrast to the very subdued sepia-adjacent look of the pharmacy scene that follows. Most will find this acceptable. And that’s kind of exactly what it is — acceptable. A perfectly pleasant image for people. The way the picture will freeze when a shot holds on a sign, for the Bailey Savings and Loan for instance, is annoying for me, because why do you need to use that kind of compression for a 4K rendering anyway? But perhaps not annoying for thee, family gathered around the home theater boisterously having popcorn or what have you. The DVD that comes with the 4K disc is a colorized version, which is low key tasteful and completely inapposite.
Movie: A Image: B-
The New York Ripper (Blue Underground)
Zombi (Blue Underground)
House by the Cemetery (Blue Underground)
Lucio Fulci concocted some of the ugliest movies ever made — aesthetically, spiritually, epistemically, you name the category, Fulci is ugly in that category. And it’s true that one can hit these marks while not meeting Benayoun’s bar for “authentic sadistic cinema.” But Fulci’s work does also meet that bar, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Fulci’s oeuvre is authentic sadistic cinema, and hence cinema sadists must reckon with it. So here we are. The meticulous folk of Blue Underground has 4K-ed three Fulci films so far and I thought I’d watch them in reverse order of repellence. Yep, I started with 1982’s The New York Ripper. Misogynist, quasi-pornographic, anti-sex, racist farrago of gore and grotesqueries, brimming with authentic Manhattan locations of the sleazy and not sleazy kind. I first watched it on a VHS tape, panned and scanned and with an image quality that seemed like it had been telecined from a print that had spent several months submerged in the East River itself. It was appalling. The 2019 restoration, on the highest res home format ever…is stunning, and even yields some beautiful imagery, in the same way that space can be negative. It is actually impressive how much “ick” this movie packs into nearly every second. Not a single character save for the slob coroner is allowed a shred of dignity. 1979’s Zombi, by contrast and despite its extreme gore, is slightly less “objectionable” because it plays like what it is, a can-you-top-this genre exercise.
1981’s House by the Cemetery is pretty brisk and sometimes genuinely atmospheric but also revels in “cheepnis” (both the budgetary and aesthetic varieties; they’re not always mutually exclusive). “It begins with a big gross out but it more restrained moving forward,” I wrote in my early note, but actually, no. It’s hella gross. And damn that is one creepy looking child actor (Giovanni Frezza), or “Italian Terror Moppet” as per Armando Munoz. More than the other two in noticeability, the House restoration has that TEAL color temperature that makes some mavens crazy. In this case it’s entirely appropriate to the content, I’d say. So okay, Blue Underground. Bring on City of the Living Dead.
The New York Ripper: Movie: D- Image: A+
Zombi: Movie: B Image A+
The House by the Cemetery: Movie: B Image A+
Prince of Darkness (Shout Factory)
They Live (Shout Factory)
Two Carpenters from the late 80s, both winners in their way, and both different. Written by Carpenter under the pen name Martin Quatermass, Prince of Darkness definitely bows to the adventures of Nigel Keane’s cranky prof — unknown evil slime in a church, whatta concept. This gives you higher detail and blacker blacks than the BR. And because 4K gives you blacker blacks, this might throw of viewers into thinking certain whites are less white, as in the white on black opening credits here. BUT check out the nun’s habit in an early scene in the actual movie and you’ll see the true whites are indeed excellent. The lighting feels subtler, and creepier. 1988’s subtle-as-a-flying-mallet societal parable They Live is always a kick. The overall look is very B movie but a lot of the cinematic grammar is art film. The cityscapes are in very patient shots, logically constructed, with a nearly Antonioniesque detachment. And yes, the Piper/Keith fight scene lasts well beyond five minutes. Cool double bill and excellent 4K values.
Prince of Darkness: Movie and image: A
They Live: Movie: A+ Image: A
Rad (Vinegar Syndrome)
Hal Needham completists got one step closer to heaven with this spectacular presentation of his 1986 BMX biking epic. The storyline’s corny, albeit in a nice Rocky way, the actor playing the teen hero tries to split the difference between Scott Baio and Ralph Macchio and often threatens to fall into the Baio abyss. But Lori Laughlin’s in it too! The biking stuff is great though — what we ‘philes like to call “pure cinema.” The 4K picture is remarkably crisp and vivid, particularly in the outdoor stunt scenes, which I guess kind of figures. But the improved detail doesn’t flatter the florid skin tones of veterans Ray Walston and Jack Weston, Hollywood vets in unsympathetic support roles. Ye Olde Talia Shire support role, however, is sympathetic, and she looks fine.
Movie: B+ Image: A+
Shutter Island (Warner)
4K here offers a conventional but gratifying boost. The image is a little darker, more noir; in some scenes it actually looks like the color grading itself has been slightly tweaked. Works like a charm or, given the movie’s grim bearing, a curse.
Movie and image: A+
Spider Man Into The Multiverse Spiderverse (Sony)
Like the female date in the Ultra Downy TV ad, this looks amazing. A feast of color and shade. Also it actually feels like some kind of fucking comic book, which no live action comic book movie has come within swinging distance of since Raimi was doing the Spider Man movies.
Movie and image: A+
Suspiria (Synapse)
Looking at the Synapse BR from 2017 it’s hard to imagine it looking any more vivid from the first two minutes on. But yeah, there we go. The colors are just as insanely vivid, but there’s an added stability and solidity that make them more seductive. I remember the very first days of DVD when I wrote about them for Premiere and talked about all the compression anomalies that could come up. Like in The Exorcist, one of the very early releases on DVD: the approaching lights of the subway train were less than convincing, kind of pixelated. And here, 25 years and two format upgrades later and every taxi headlight in that rainy airport waiting area is perfect. Early into the format the anomalies were all but unavoidable, but as the tech advanced when you saw this sort of thing it more often than not was a sign of sloppiness or cutting corners. The current technology is clearly fabulous but I’m sure there are ways of screwing it up. The people who made this disc absolutely didn’t screw it up; they applied it to its limits and made an amazing disc.
Movie and image: A+
Tenet (Warner)
Pretty good picture! It’s not THAT hard to follow, you just have to pay attention. And I got the dialogue just fine, except for the parts I wasn’t meant to. A little po-faced, but to those who bitched that it lacks the joie de vivre of a Bond movie, have you seen a Bond movie recently? Least John David Washington isn’t playing a guilt-ridden self-torturing alcoholic. I thought the Branagh character was miscast (just because my familiarity with Branagh doing good acting with accents has been leaning toward mild contempt) and not terrifically written but overall? A romp! And beautifully shot. And the disc looks (and sounds) remarkable.
Movie: A- Image: A+
Top Gun (Paramount)
I don’t want to sound like a weepy old bolshy but this war mongering advertisement for the military-industrial complex is still a horrible movie about horrible people doing horrible things, and it rubs your face in that fact every minute. The critic Esther Zuckerman called The Wolf of Wall Street “a Douchebag’s Handbook;” well, this was the 1985 Young Republican’s Handbook and it’s still in play, and it’s responsible for a lot more material damage. Sure, it is fast-moving and “exhilaratingly” outlandish in its action. And Tom Cruise’s performance is superb; you really just want to strangle him in the first ten minutes. (Poor Kelly McGillis, playing a character who actually wants to sleep with this sociopath.). Anyway, the 4K is a mild but noticeably boost on the BR. And looks amazing.
Movie: Too gross to grade. Image: A+
Total Recall (Lionsgate)
As Robert Harris has pointed out this is a pretty janky-looking movie to begin with. Possibly by design, given the prerogatives of the frequently perverse director. I mean, consider the idea of Mars in this movie being the supposed real world, but looking like a papier mâché futuristic Coney Island of the mind. It’s funny. And honestly I kind of love how it looks, it’s total B-movie shit. Also: “Get your ass to Mars” is one of my favorite lines of movie dialogue ever, the movie delights in fantastic gratuitous touches like THE DEATH OF JONNY CAB, the bar-cum-sex club The Last Resort is the R-rated Mos Eisely Cantina, etc., etc. I dunno, I think it’s just all kind of irresistible.
Movie and Image: A
The Wizard of Oz (Warner)
The boost is slight but real. Watching the 4K version I really started noticing how technically wonky it is, if you care about that sort of thing. This movie has more “bad cuts” than Goodfellas! Look at what happens when she leaves the house and steps into Munchkinland, her arm positioning is all over the place! But it’s The Wizard of Oz. So.
Movie and Image: A+
Nailed it with the Marvel/Disney directors description, Glenn. Still laughing. Why they haven't let the likes of Joe Dante loose upon their films is beyond me. Anyways thanks for the guide, a great read.
Posted by: Mark | January 22, 2021 at 06:38 AM
I love these guides, always happy when a new one goes up. Thanks!
Posted by: Mike Molloy | January 22, 2021 at 11:25 AM
Great, now I have to buy the White Album again.
Posted by: EddieMarsAttack | January 22, 2021 at 11:27 AM
Thanks! By the way, I didn't get into a lot of tech detail here because I'm pitching to the lay reader, but some who've been heavily researching 4K Ultra discs have asked about the Digiraw site that lists 4K Ultra discs and designates them "real" or "fake." (The site, if you're interested: https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD-ripping-service/the-real-or-fake-4K-list/?fbclid=IwAR3nO5fytzTyQA75VPS4qAOyUr_Tpzx7TyMKBMLyt2YdZ9fBHJv5Lqi9QNQ )
It designates both "Collateral" and "Spider-Man: Into the Multiverse" as "fake." Now as it happens, "Collateral" was shot in a 1080p format to begin with, and "upscaled" for 4K. "Multiverse" is from a 2160p source. Math heads will note that "2160" is not "4000," OR IS IT? A friend in the field writes: "It might be worth clarifying that 2160P is indeed 4K, it’s simply the vertical number of pixels as opposed to the horizontal (4096 for native 4K, 3840 for TV display resolution). This was the same case for HD, which settled on 1080P as industry shorthand (again, the number referring to the vertical pixel count in the image rather than the 1920 horizontal). Kind of an odd trend really, given that in both cases the higher horizontal number would have been the more impressive one to cite, but there you go."
So the "boost" you'll get from a 4K disc of "Multiverse" compared to the Blu-ray is not illusory or for that matter "fake." And the upscaling of "Collateral" looks...really good.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 22, 2021 at 11:50 AM
Michael Mann is the only mainstream director who's ever done anything interesting with the medium of digital cinematography.
Posted by: Andrew Del Monte | January 22, 2021 at 12:21 PM
All that matters to Marvel/Disney, in terms of visuals, are CGI and second unit. The directors are like TV hacks or studio contract directors in the '30s, hired to make sure the actors hit their marks and speak their lines clearly. And that every shot is brightly lit and in focus. That's all.
Disney has a lot in common with "golden age" MGM, as a place where producers and executives call the shots and directors are interchangeable cogs.
Posted by: George | January 22, 2021 at 02:57 PM
George, I think that's somewhat accurate, though I'd argue that the studio system gave enough creative freedom for some of those directors (Curtiz, Wellman, etc.) to differentiate themselves as, if not auteurs, then something approaching it. With Marvel/Disney I feel like it's the opposite: auteurs go in and their work gets ground up and becomes mostly indecipherable from the less-talented hacks working on the other films (see: Ryan Coogler). Some semblances remain, but they're mostly stamped out in the name of continuity.
Posted by: MarkVH | January 22, 2021 at 03:17 PM
Glenn, does the Sony UBP-X800E decode HDCD? (If you still have CD's, you may have quite a few.) And do the discs feel very warm after they've been played? Over the years, I've noticed that burn-on-demand DVD-R's are more likely to develop playback issues from heat exposure - some players (like Oppos) will heat up quite a bit while others (like an old Onkyo I still use) stay pretty much at room temperature.
Posted by: In the market for a new player | January 22, 2021 at 05:00 PM
My understanding of HDCD it that it's backward-compatible with the conventional CD format. The format that needs decoding is SACD, or Super Audio CD, and this player does that. I have not noticed any discs overheating in the machine.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 22, 2021 at 05:10 PM
Glenn, thanks for the great post! Can you elaborate a bit on: "Blu-rays whose bitrate went beyond what the OPPO could actually handle." I'm not very technically-minded when it comes to this stuff, and I haven't ever considered that some older players would not be able to handle the higher bitrate content of some discs. Can you share the model of OPPO player that you owned? I have a region-free UDP-203 - is this something that I need to be concerned about at this point in time with this particular player? Also, I'm curious what happens if you attempt to play a disc that exceeds the maximum bitrate capacity of a particular player. Will the quality of the playback suffer, or will it simply not play it?
Posted by: Michael | January 23, 2021 at 12:20 AM
Thanks Glenn. FWIW, when a CD is encoded with HDCD, it's *playable* on any optical drive, but not to the mastering's full resolution. HDCD is basically a tricky way of packing 20-bit data into a 16-bit container - it more or less hides the extra musical data in the least significant bit of a 16-bit music file. When properly decoded, the full 20-bit signal is unpacked.
(This may be getting into too much detail, but another reason why HDCD decoding is still desirable is that a lot of CD's mastered with HDCD use a built-in peak limiting option - this is kind of a byproduct of the "loudness wars" when more and more compression, limiting, etc. was applied to every new record so they would immediately pop out as louder at the expense of dynamic range and less digital artifacts. When an HDCD encoded CD with peak limiting enabled is properly decoded, the full dynamic range is restored on playback.)
Posted by: Re: HDCD | January 23, 2021 at 02:54 AM
Always both a treat to read these guides & also a danger of how much money they'll cost me afterwards. Since you enjoyed "Suspiria", another 4K you may want to investigate is "Don't Look Now."
Oh, and for accuracy's sake — it's "Spider-Man Into The SPIDER-Verse" rather than Multiverse.
Posted by: Kevin Sharp | January 23, 2021 at 10:36 AM
To "Re: HDCD:" FWIW, the player recognizes SACDs as such but the HDCD I put in it is recognized as a 16 bit, plain old CD.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 23, 2021 at 12:12 PM
Thanks Glenn, much appreciated
Posted by: Re: HDCD | January 23, 2021 at 03:54 PM
Great that you have made the step to 4K discs Glenn. Totally agree that the Second Sight Dawn Of The Dead box is the best release so far on the format.
The really noticeable difference between 4K and blu ray discs are in projection onto large screens. It really does replicate - and even betters - the theatrical experience. However, the huge drawback with quite a few 4K discs is the slathering of High Dynamic Range all over the picture. This is done by teenage boys at the mastering desk, because it's so "cool" to see the colours "pop". Looks terrible projected - projectors can't handle this. Flat panels manage this better, but I'd rather not see old classic movies with radically different colours and contrast schemes on 4K discs.
You will discover that not all mastering companies are equal. Very few publishers reveal who has done the mastering of their discs. Arrow are the exception - most of their 4K masters are done by Fidelity In Motion (who have the Robert Harris seal of approval).
https://www.fidelityinmotion.com/our-work.php
It does make for frustrating purchases - especially from StudioCanal. Some of their 4K discs, such as the 4K discs of The Ladykillers, The Elephant Man and Breathless, are sensational. Others, such as Le Cercle Rouge, not so much. Be careful of the German Koch Media 4K discs. Several I've purchased look shittier than the blu-rays (Showgirls and Dog Soldiers are particularly bad).
And everyone wonders why the hell Criterion can't be bothered to dip their toes in the water. They missed three opportunities last year: Parasite, Elephant Man and Crash were all afforded 4K disc releases by other publishers.
Posted by: Titch | January 24, 2021 at 02:48 AM
Titch, I swear by Fidelity in Motion — hell, he's been to my house a few times. (Its founder and CEO, David MacKenzie, has recorded all of the audio commentaries I've done for the past six years. He's fantastic to work with.) Bummer to hear about "Cercle" as I ordered it last week. But I'll definitely look into "Breathless" at least. And avoid the German Koch stuff. Word around the "campfire" suggests that Criterion may dip their toes this year — but I haven't heard this from anyone AT Criterion, so who knows.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 24, 2021 at 07:53 AM
Mark VH: Agree with you that some directors rose above the studio system, often by becoming their own producers (Hitchcock, Hawks, Capra) or by forming alliances with producers who protected them (such as John Huston with Ray Stark or John Ford with Meriam C. Cooper).
Curtiz certainly had a visual style -- though some have argued that came more from Anton Grot's sets or the Warner cinematographers. I don't know how much input Curtiz had in the scripts he shot. Probably not much, judging from his pace in the '30s and early '40s.
Posted by: George | January 24, 2021 at 03:56 PM
And,yes, even Ryan Coogler had to deliver the CGI battle climax that is expected in superhero movies, just like Patty Jenkins did at Warner for WONDER WOMAN. (Haven't seen WW84.)There's no director's "stamp" on either sequence, as there was with a Peckinpah or Leone shoot-out.
Posted by: George | January 24, 2021 at 04:16 PM
Glenn - I found the blu-ray of StudioCanal Le Cercle Rouge has a rather better colour grading than the 4K disc.You get both in the package, so you can compare yourself. The opposite is the case with Breathless - the 4K disc is exquisite, while the blu-ray is worse than the Criterion released a decade ago. Impossible to predict in advance what one's going to get - unless you have David MacKenzie at the wheel. Impressed that you hobnob with the upper echelons of video mastering wizards.
Posted by: Titch | January 25, 2021 at 03:11 AM