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“The Dark Knight” on Blu-ray was released this week
Well, it’s here. “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan’s much-lauded follow-up to “Batman Begins,” with Christian Bale comfortably in the reins and Heath Ledger in his Oscar-buzzworthy final role—and it’s out today on Blu-ray.
OK, so it’s out on standard DVD as well, and time will soon tell us which format sells better. And that leads us to a larger question—is this the release that Blu-ray’s been waiting for? It’s certainly the most anticipated. But will “The Dark Knight” push people to go out and buy a Blu-ray player, and buy a Blu-ray disc?
Or will you pay a little less and watch it upscaled to “near high-def” on your Oppo or other solid upconverting DVD player, and merely add it to your already large standard DVD collection?
It’s been almost 10 years since “The Matrix” essentially played that role for the DVD format (though it didn’t get quite the same praise as “The Dark Knight” while it was in theaters) as a must-own disc. Despite the improved audio and video quality, there wasn’t nearly the buzz about “The Ultimate Matrix Collection” on high-def media.
Early word is that “The Dark Knight” already topped 100,000 copies sold on its first day in the UK. It’s bound to smash numbers set by “Iron Man” recently and become a must-own Blu-ray.
Early reviews have been very favorable, as well—High-Def Digest and Gizmodo had kind words to say, among others.
But will you buy it on Blu-ray? We know it has some sweet interactive features that are exclusive to the format, and there’s Digital Copy as well. Blu-ray and DVD sales are down right now—so for one thing, DVD might be good enough for most people, and for another, they might just wait to rent the copy (or stream it) from Netflix.
What do you think the reaction to “The Dark Knight” on Blu-ray will be—will it kickstart your own Blu-ray library—maybe you’ll go get other reference A/V demo material like “Wall-E,” “Casino Royale,” “Iron Man,” and “Transformers” for your home theater? Will it carry “The Matrix” effect for the format?
I have a Panny 2000, and a HTB anamorphic lens, and have watch TDK 2 times now and I can’t see or didn’t notice any problems with the Imax sceens.
Over on AVS forum other ppl with CIH set up have said the same thing.
Tony, when they filmed the IMAX scenes, they purposely framed scenes in the middle. In order to get it 16x9, they chopped some top and bottom off, but you’re not missing anything there. How could you “turn it off” anyway? That would mean deleting the scenes altogether. The resolution of those scenes are still superior, due to the huge film size, and it was scanned at 8K! I much rather have that, then the player/tv having to switch from 4:3 to 2.35:1! Nolan’s motive for shooting those particular scenes in IMAX was for clarity over size. There’s talk he wants to shoot a movie entirely in IMAX.
What a non article with a bunch of what ifs and maybes. I expect this #### with UFO documentaries not cogent writing about reality.
Stick to the facts and leave the hyperbole to retarded liberals and UFO buffs
I don’t have a constant height setup (yet), but I would think that the way constant height works, if the scene switches to full 16:9 for the IMAX scenes, it will wreak havoc on your visible picture. For each such scene you would have to turn your video processor’s stretch mode off, which may just be an annoying push of a button (i.e., Panny AE3000 owners and owners with setups that, in addition to vertically stretching the image, can also squeeze the image) but for many will also require phyiscal removal of an anamorphic lens from the light path. Some people have push button mechanisms for this, but many do not, and those people would have to pause the movie, make physical adjustments to their setup, then restart, and repeat this process every time the aspect ratio changes. This would be very annoying. And yes, the IMAX scenes will be smaller than the 2.35:1 scenes for the constant height crowd. They will have the right and left edges of their screens blank during these scenes. So yes, it absolutely makese sense to release a version either without the IMAX scenes or, even better, have a way to turn them off and show the non-IMAX theatrical scenes.
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Big Blue, even DVD can do seemless branching. All they have to do is include both version of the scene. When you choose in the Menu if you want to see the IMAX version or not, the player will switch to that scene when the time comes (ie.you don’t need 2 full version of the movie on disc).
I understand that those IMAX scenes are filmed in IMAX and that the theaterical presentation has those scenes cropped. But as you can see, the aspect changing does bother people. Now, that the IMAX scenes for Blu-Ray are actaully cropped too which make it bad for purists also.