Ridley Scott's Gladiator was released on Blu Ray on September 1st. The studio behind this release has applied heavy processing resulting in arrows and spears disappearing from the image. Detail suffers and edge enhancement adds a halo like image around the borders of objects and people.
Click here to see mouseover comparisons which show the extent of the damage done to Gladiator and note also the processed look of the image and how bad it all is and the blue tint now added to the image due to the unnecessary processing applied to the transfer.
Edge enhancement is an unnecessary evil on high definition content and is usually only applied if too much digital noise reduction or other form of heavy processing has reduced image detail. It's a fake way of sharpening the image and at first glance you assume the image is sharp and detailed. At second glance you notice halo's around people and objects and at third glance you just throw up.
The usual reason for doing this is because they are using a very old master and do not want to pay to strike a new one so instead apply additional processing.
Gladiator has been released in a much hyped Sapphire series meant to represent the very best image quality. Fans of the film are less than happy and many have voiced grave concerns about the transfer. The transfer suffers from excessive DNR, edge enhancement and is atrocious.
The latest news as of late July 2010 is that Paramount have listened to complaints and have an exchange program in place, if you live in North America then just give them an email at PHE_Customerservice@Paramount.com and let them know you wish to exchange your disc.
In Europe where the title is distributed by Universal you can take advantage of this exchange program sometime during the last week of August 2010. This is proof that complaining works.
It’s also worth noting that the unprocessed shots from the extended scenes on the disc look outstanding and show how this film could have looked if they had not been so heavy handed with the post processing.
Gladiator is an epic film with millions of fans and was surely deserving of a better fate than this!
It’s been a bad year for some really great films looking so very average or downright bad on Blu Ray.
It’s unfortunate that the “it looks better than DVD” comments do untold harm towards making the format better. The bar should be raised so it’s a lot higher than just better than a DVD.
The most unforgiving aspect of it all is the fact they not only overdid the processing on this release but the fact they didn’t have any quality control and didn’t see that parts of the image are erased.
Those parts which were erased from arrows and fireballs and possibly more scenes are actually present in the DVD editions which means the studio who did this and it’s either Dreamworks, Universal or Paramount who worked on the actual transfer but whoever did it did not run a proper check and someone approved this release. I suspect Dreamworks are responsible for this one.
I hope Ridley Scott gets involved and we see a new transfer and perhaps even a recall. I think it’s a slim chance but the more the word gets out the better the chance of getting something done and if nothing else even if Gladiator is not fixed it may ensure future releases have some sort of quality control.