danny_boy said:

zombie84 said:

captainsolo said:

adywan said:

i guess they got a bunch of people they knew would say how good the transfers look, but really haven't got a clue what they are saying. Clueless statements, like the above mentioned and the following, invalidated anything that they say in that review for me:

While the newer Star Wars films were ready made for high definition, the older films will obviously suffer a little from the all scrutinizing eye of HD. (The only pre-digital, color sci-fi film that holds up spectacularly well to date is 2001: A Space Odyssey; and to quote Malcolm McDowell out of context, you’re talking about Stanley fucking Kubrick. No offense, Mr. Lucas.)

Of course 2001 looks great. It's been well taken care of and was shot in 70mm for later Cinerama projection! It's not your standard 35!!!!

And I take it these people didn't see the Blu-rays of Forbidden Planet, CEoT3K, and the fantastic looking Planet of the Apes and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Also, I don't believe 2001 had optical composites, it was done (at least mostly) in-camera. So, the VFX sequences have no generational loss and are in 65mm to boot. There isn't going to be anything that rivals that in terms of resolution.

As for Avatar--yes, Avatar was shot in 1080p. Avatar is also a primarily animated film, whereby the 1920x1080 live action elements constitute either a small portion of a larger, digital composite, and the purely/mostly live-action sequences constitute only a small portion of the completed film. Also, Cameron filmed it with much better cameras than AOTC/ROTS, which basically used the very first HD motion picture camera. The resolution of digital video is less important than the number of lines it can resolve, the dynamic range, how it handles highlights and black levels, the depth of colour, and other such issues.

This is why modern films shot in 1080p look very good, as detailed as most or all modern 35mm films which you see theatrically. When you see a 35mm film theatrically you aren't likely to be seeing more detail than a 1080p projection anyway because of generational loss, and in the home you aren't likely to be able to resolve more lines than HD video is capable of displaying on a screen that is less than five or six feet wide. 4K home theatre would pretty much be a waste of money. I don't know if they will ever propose such a thing, but one would be foolish to buy into it unless you had a bona fide screening room (and even then the difference might be minimal). This is different than 4K scanning of 35mm film though, because you want that high resolution so that the HD downconvert has all the information possible--I don't know what exactly the science behind it is, but there doesn't seem to be true "lossless" HD scan to HD projection, whenever you scan from HD and project in HD it looks worse than when scanning from 4K and projecting in HD.

To be honest----digital(2K/1080p) looks better than 35mm(Ok--with generation loss)---they even did side by side comparisons as far back as 1999 with the Phantom Menace itself:

Electronic Cinema Debuts in Beautiful Downtown Burbank

By Scott Wilkinson • Posted: Jun 20, 1999

So how is the quality of the digital image? During a press conference held on June 17 at the AMC Burbank 14 multiplex, a short clip was shown in a split screen: Half the image was from a new, high-quality film print, and the other half was from the digital "print." Once the two images were manually synchronized, the difference was remarkably clear: The digital image was much sharper, with much better color fidelity than the film print. For example, the Jedi council room has large windows through which the sky is visible. In the digital image, the sky and clouds were clearly delineated, but they were blurred into a bluish blob on the film side of the screen. Rick McCallum, one of the producers of The Phantom Menace and a press-conference panelist, said the digital version is a much more accurate representation of what they shot than the film version.

http://www.ultimateavmag.com/content/electronic-cinema-debuts-beautiful-downtown-burbank

I agree, but only to an extent. It depends on the projector. A "digital image" says nothing about the resolution it was projected at (HD/2K/4K) and what type of projector was used. Some digital projections I have watched in theatres are the best visual presentations I have ever seen (i.e. Blade Runner), while in others the 35mm was much better (as was the case the second time I saw Inception). In an ideal situation using good equipment, digital projection wins, but this is not necessarily what every theatre is using. It also depends on the quality of the digital master as well. So there is no single answer to the question. It all depends on the variables of what you are comparing.