Video: How Does The Disc Look?
The film's theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is presented in anamorphic video and the images are very good. There is excellent color balance with natural skin tones and blood-red blood, deep rich blacks, and no visible digital artifacts. My complaint with the original release, visible edge halos, is greatly suppressed; this is obvious from the opening credits. The thick white letters against dark backgrounds no longer contain bright interior outlines around slightly darker cores; the white is more uniform. Compared to the earlier release, this Superbit disc is less messy looking; edge ringing is always a bit distracting. But alas, the video's overall appearance is soft. Fine textures and small object detail are only moderately improved over previous releases. The level of detail simply isn't up to the best current releases by Warner Bros. and Fox. I'm left to speculate that the film elements are soft.
Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?
As you might expect from a Superbit release, there are two 5.1 tracks on this DVD, Dolby Digital and DTS. The quality of the original stems is such that I'm hard pressed to discern a difference between the two tracks. I simply couldn't detect a difference in the timbre of voices or music. But when I compared this new Superbit disc to the original release, I discovered that the lowest octave of deep bass on this new disc had been rolled back. During the opening action sequence, from the time Tonto finds himself looking down the barrel of a semiautomatic handgun, a huge bass drum in Eric Serra's score is tapped repeatedly. In the original release, I could feel the drum in the pit of my stomach; in this new Superbit release, it is audible but unfelt from either of the two 5.1 tracks. Consequently, the sounds of gunfire are less visceral on this new disc and some of the drama suffers as a consequence. This is not an amplitude issue; while watching the Superbit release, I kicked up the gain as much as 9 dB with no significant tactile improvement in the bass. The reasonably active surround effects remain very much the same, but they are rarely discrete. Disable EX decoding.
Subtitles are provided in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English, for which Closed Captions are also available.
En gros, images un poil meilleures (plus de halos) et son beaucoup moins viscéral
Donc, pour caricaturer, on se retrouve avec une édition où l'image est bonne et le son moins bon et une autre où l'audio est bon et l'image moins bonne (est-ce que je me fais bien comprendre ?
). Bref, l'idéal serait d'attendre une hypothétique édition spéciale en Z2
Michaël.
