Blu Ray Screencaps of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring.
The first set of pictures are from the Blu Ray edition of the movie, the second set are the HD television broadcast images, click and open both to compare images.
I think the differences are slight when you take contrast and colour changes into account for most of the frames below but check out frames 9, 11 and 12 and you can see grain removal has been done to the Blu Ray edition and frame 9 clearly shows processing tools have also been used to remove specks on the Blu Ray edition, when you consider the HD television edition probably already had some grain removal it shows how bad these releases really are.
You can argue that 90% of the release may be good, i don't buy it though as thats still 20 minutes per film that's bad and likely more. The casual viewer will enjoy these films on Blu Ray regardless of the drop in detail levels and many will justify purchases saying it's better than the DVD. Blu Ray though is about high definition detail and filtering removes that therefore the justification is weak and should be called upon whenever someone uses that phrase.
It is possible that the problem exists on the digital intermediate but unlikely since some of the HD television frames show more detail and more film grain, it's therefore much more likely that Warner/New Line applied DNR to the release and that's after an additional clean up which also likely robbed the film of some high frequency information. Its pathetic that this will be labelled as a high quality release when it only touches on what is possible if the studio laid off the processing tools and spent money on a proper new master.
The first set of images below starts with Frodo and are from the Blu Ray, the second set also start with Frodo and are from the HD MPEG 2 tv broadcast.
View blu ray screencaps of The Lord Of The Rings below. Click twice for the full HD image.
nice film