Quote:
Originally Posted by martymcfly
Wow, how bad mannered can you get? I thought it looked great and I have been a huge fan of the film for a number of years. If you are talking about grain, then that is a natural part of the image and shouldn't be completely removed anyway, because it can cause problems elsewhere (see Predator's re-release on Blu-ray which had rampant, reckless use of DNR, making Arnie look plastic in some scenes.)
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The Back to the Future BRD is by no means the mangled mess that Predator and Gladiator were, but those are examples of TERRIBLE BRD transfers, rather than simply "mediocre" or "unnecessarily harmed".
They essentially applied filters that hurt image quality to the master they used for the HDTV airings. Essentially the movie would have looked better if they had done NOTHING and just put the same master onto a BRD and take advantage of that bitrate rather than taking that same master and messing around with it. It's not that it looks horrible, it's that it looks worse than it would if they did nothing and it there is no justifiable reason it should, just incompetence by Universal.
These examples stolen from a guy on AVSforum. These compare an HDTV airing before the "restoration" and the Blu-Ray after the "restoration".
DNR example between HDTV airing and Blu-Ray, loss of texture
Edge Enhancement Halo
Crushed blacks. Here, detail is lost for just a jet black in these parts, there is no texture to it.
Is it watchable? Yeah. Is it better than the DVD? Mostly, though it's a small trade-off. Is it worse than it should be, considering Universal could have spent the time picking their noses and done an actually better job? Hell yeah.