HD screencaps of Smallville season 9 on the blu ray format.
The end of season 8 of Smallville was a disappointment for me, after a long build up we finally get the confrontation between Doomsday and Clark Kent and it fizzled out, now i suppose the budget just didn't allow for a major battle between these foes but considering that Doomsday kills Superman in the comic books i really expected so much more from the final episode of last season, it just felt like an anti climax to me but the end of that episode also introduced the main foe for season 9, that foe is Zod, in Superman 2 he was General Zod, in Smallville season 9 he is younger and only Major Zod but he is just as ruthless as his movie incarnation.
The opening episode introduces us to Zod and news reporter John Corben and Clark is told by Jor-El in the Fortress of Solitude to cut all ties with his friends before he begins his training to become Superman, i think it's a solid start to the season and the introduction to Corben sets up episode 2 where he becomes Metallo, Corben has a grudge against the red and blue blur aka Clark Kent and uses his new found powers as Metallo to hunt the blur down, this is a very good episode and features some very nice photography for a tv show, the third episode has a virus being released in Metropolis that turns people into zombies, this episode was like a Smallville 28 days later and was fun, all in all a good solid start to season 9 of the show.
Image quality was typical for a Warner show on blu ray, some compression artifacts and basically not as good as it could possibly be, acceptable and ok but never as good as shows like Lost look on blu ray and that's down to the fact they try and cram six episodes in per disc, typically the file size per episode is around 32% less disc space per episode, for example a typical episode will take up around 6.7GB of disc space, a typical episode of Lost is around 9.5GB, my percentage figures are probably a little out but one thing is for certain and that is some compromises are made on image quality when they put six episodes on a disc instead of the four that other studio's use.
The sound quality is fine for a television show, it's not as impressive as Lost which is my current benchmark for a television show but it's serviceable and the Save Me theme tune sounds good.
View some blu ray screencaps of Smallville below. Double click for the full HD image.
