#2961
Post
by BirdLives » Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:12 pm
Anyone else received their disc of Husbands and Wives? I received mine yesterday and the image is, to me... very disappointing. It's dark and very red. With a lot of fiddling with my TV settings (contrast down, brightness up, saturation [color] down a bit, color shifted toward green/away from red 5 points or so) I can get an ok/acceptable image, but I'm still a bit surprised.
With those adjustments to my TV, outdoor or well-lit scenes look fine. The extra resolution/detail versus DVD is great. But much of the movie takes places indoors at night in dim light, and some scenes really push the amount of light (for instance, the Liam Neeson/Judy Davis lovemaking scene). In those scenes, on my (plasma) TV, the blacks lose all detail and even have a kind of "electronic" look to my eye that makes the black areas seem to "float" in front of other colors. I've never seen this effect before with any disc, and I've got scores of them. (Which makes me think, I should look at some of the opening scenes of the Godfather and compare...)
I compared to my old DVD of H&W and the DVD is clearly boosted. It's much brighter. But there is at least some detail in the dark areas. For instance, in the "interview" sections Judy Davis' dark red hair still has detail on the DVD, while on this new blu ray, large areas of her hair fall off to pure black. It's a little distracting.
I have 10 or 12 other Twilight Time releases and have never noticed this before. Bananas looks great, Crimes and Misdemeanors looks great, (which also makes me think, I should look at Purple Rose of Cairo again; that has many dark scenes... ETA: following up, looked at Purple Rose and it looks excellent)... I remember that in the theater H&W was darkish, but I don't remember it being this dark, and I have no other disc in my collection which requires such adjustment to the TV to look acceptable. A bit odd...
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