Speaking of Warner, they’ve just officially announced (jointly with HBO and Legendary Entertainment) something we’ve known from retail listings for a while now, which is that Dune: Prophecy – The Complete First Season is coming to Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD on 5/13. The set will include all 6 episodes, plus over an hour of bonus content that includes 5 extended featurettes and an all-new, never-before-seen featurette exclusive to 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD. You can see the cover art above left.
Finally this morning, there have been some comments on social media to the fact that Sony’s new 4K Ultra HD Steelbook release of David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002) offers disappointing A/V quality. So I wanted to share some important context on the topic. First a quick note: I haven’t actually seen the 4K disc yet myself—the title is being reviewed online by people who work for (or are) distributors, so 4K longtime press and critics largely don’t have their hands on the disc yet.
That said, keep in mind that it was Fincher himself who supervised and determined virtually everything about this release, including the remastering. Second, it seems unlikely that a new film scan was done in this case. Like Zodiac (reviewed in 4K here) the original 2K DI of Panic Room—which is the finished version of the film—was probably upsampled and used as the basis for new remastering work. Remember, Se7en (also reviewed here in 4K) was actually finished on film, not as DI. Given that the 2K DI of Panic Room was completed in 2001-2002, its image quality going to be limited to the state of the art at that time, so improvements over… say… a Blu-ray version will be modest, much less the average 4K disc of another film today. Edge enhancement was very common back then. The digital effects were of lower resolution. And any DNR would almost certainly have been applied then, not now. This is simply a case where the film—because of its vintage—can only look so good, thus it’s wise to keep your expectations in check. But then you also need to remember one more detail, and this is very important: There never was a proper Blu-ray release of this film. So the correct point of comparison for this new 4K image should be to Sony’s previous Superbit DVD release. And I should think that the improvements in image quality from that will be significant.
Anyway, just food for thought. Of course, we’ll post a full 4K review of the title here at The Bits when we get our hands on it.
That’s all for now! Stay tuned...
- Bill Hunt
(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)