Blu-ray Video Quality Depends on Transfer Quality

What you saw at the start of that format was the same umming and aahing about just what to upgrade, but then once we were a decade deep into it pretty much everyone was happy to upgrade to any semi-decent looking Blu-ray disc, regardless of how good the DVD already might have been. I think many adopters will reach the same point with UHD eventually, especially as UHDs become more frequently available at bargain sale prices. Taking Michael's examples, BOTH Suspiria and The Revenant are sourced from the same excellent transfers in their Blu-ray and UHD editions, so the same upgrade/no upgrade logic can be applied to both if you're just looking at that basis.

But also, yes, the final cut does look better in high definition. I mentioned that the grainy look is not necessarily bad, however that doesn't mean a better transfer isn't possible. Sometimes the grain can be eliminated gracefully, it depends on the vault elements available.

If a 4K video has been compressed heavily or is low quality, it may not look better than a high-quality 1080p video regardless of where you're sitting. Another wrinkle to this story is that modern 4K TVs have become very good at upscaling 1080p ...

Thing is, everyone was banging on about the amazing quality of Blu Ray long before many discs were released, but the reality is the technical benefit of the format is just simply that it offers up to twice the resolution of NTSC/PAL, which is not the same thing as twice or indeed any better quality.

The higher the bitrate, the more data can be transferred per second, and hence the higher the picture quality. Most streaming services (such as Netflix and Prime Video) have around 15-25Mbps.

The Blu-ray Disc · system employs a limit equalizer to improve the S/N ratio and to measure jitter for disc evaluation. With · the limit equalizer, it is possible to determine the quality of recorded marks with high sensitivity. ... This section outlines some measurement results using the technologies explained in section 2. Fig. 2.6.1 shows a satisfactory signal quality even when recording at a data transfer speed of 72Mbps

Virtually all movies made these days have a 2k master digital-intermediate resolution, regardless of any film-scan or digital-cinema camera resolution--which in theory can be up to 8k with Sony's F65 or in reality with a 65mm film scan such as "Baraka" (see last Milestone ). Make that, after this recent IMDB search , roughly 19,200 2ks, 1290 4ks, and 24 8ks. I used a Blu-ray that started with a 4k D.I., "The Tree of Life," to measure effective or visible resolutions, comparing fine details to multiburst varying line widths last year .

While the film definitely looked a bit saturated in theaters, it looks downright awful on Blu-ray. The transfer is sun baked, to say the least, and smeared with heavy, bleeding blacks and ugly, bold reds (which brings out color banding).

The issues with this 4K release have nothing to do with the movie itself as it all comes down to the various issues with the transfer and the implementation of digital noise reduction (DNR).