The Lord of the Ring Blu-ray discs will be released on April 6, but a few lucky nerds already have access to it. And they don’t like what they see.
Take a look at this first image posted by AVS Forum user eric.exe. It’s from the 23Mbps VC1 Blu-ray encoding. Good, right? Well check out the 17Mbps MPEG-2 version below and compare the sharpness, not the color as the user notes that it was probably skewed in the broadcasting.
Notice anything different? Load both in seperate tabs and compare the two. Gandalf’s face should look a bit more smooth, almost plasticy in the Blu-ray version. The same goes for the wooden door frame. It looks blurry in the Blu-ray release where the HD broadcast version has a lot more detail.
But the difference can clearly be seen in Gandalf’s beard with the Blu-ray version showing a lot of extra noise. There are about a dozen more examples posted on AVS Forum if you need more proof.
Sure, these are the things that only nerds with advanced A/V setups will see and care about, but god bless them. Without their watchful eyes, who knows what type of crap movie studios would release. [via The Blu-ray Blog]