| Editorial November 2008
Paying More for Less: Not the Blu-ray Way
 The Blu-ray editions of Walt
Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the spiritual travelogue Baraka, and Mel
Brooks’ Young Frankenstein are all reviewed this month. To my mind, these
titles exemplify what Blu-ray releases should be. They deliver on expectations and make a
good case for the format. To truly appreciate these films, you have to see them on Blu-ray
-- even an upconverted DVD doesn’t cut it.
But so far, such Blu-ray editions seem less the rule than
the exception. At the same time these were being released, BD versions of Carrie
and The Amityville Horror were also issued. Neither looks newly minted, and neither
has any extras beyond a trailer -- even though a recent special-edition SD DVD of Carrie
was crammed with extras. A month earlier, Warner Home Video released on BD Interview
with the Vampire, which you would reasonably expect to have a Dolby Digital TrueHD
soundtrack, as that’s the high-definition sound format Warner favors. But this
disc’s audio is plain old Dolby Digital -- not even Dolby Digital Plus.
The list price of Carrie and The Amityville
Horror is $39.98 -- $5 higher than the price of Baraka or Sleeping Beauty.
Yes, that’s right: less for more. In these difficult economic times, that’s hard
to swallow. Presumably, if the studios want to make a go of Blu-ray, they need to prove
it. People who buy Blu-ray editions expect a better picture, higher-resolution sound, and
more extras -- or at least as many as are included in the SD DVD editions. After all,
these are exactly what ads for the new format tout as selling points.
I have nothing against stripped-down editions. Back in my
vinyl-collecting days, at the dawn of stereo, EMI released its classical titles in two
editions. One had a full-color front cover, and a back cover loaded with program notes.
They also released budget editions in a generic brownish cover with a gold wraparound seal
that contained the basic artist and repertory information about the title, and perhaps a
paragraph’s worth of notes. As I remember, the stripped-down edition cost about a
buck less than the other, and many less affluent collectors (especially college students)
welcomed them.
If today’s producers want to put out stripped-down
Blu-ray releases that include only the film itself, that’s fine by me. But even such
editions, no matter when or how the films were originally produced, should include a new
hi-def film transfer, a soundtrack in one of the hi-rez audio formats, and a lower price;
this way, those who don’t care about extras yet want to collect more titles can do
so. After all, this is only what Blu-ray customers have been led to expect by the
promoters of the format.
Some studios have made efforts in this direction by putting
most of the extras on a second disc. That way, they can also offer for sale the first disc
alone, which contains the feature, and save the cost of including the extras. The only
cost is the repackaging. In the cases where this has been done, the price difference
between the one- and two-disc editions has not been as great as it might be.
One of the things that hurt HD DVD was that Universal,
the first company to release hi-def films exclusively on that format, was in such a hurry
to put out a lot of titles that they slapped their old SD DVD transfers on
HD DVDs and rushed them out the door. No wonder the casual viewer saw little
improvement over SD DVD. I’m hoping those who release films on Blu-ray will wake
up, not follow Universal’s example, and give the customer what they and the Blu-ray
Disc Association actually claim to offer in their ads -- and at a fair price.
Don’t make customers pay more for less -- otherwise,
unless they’re diehard Blu-ray fanatics, they’ll stop buying. If you don’t
think you’re getting your money’s worth, complain. Don’t leave it up to the
critics. Studios listen to the people who actually spend money to buy their products. If
the format is to succeed and attract a wider public, early adopters must voice their
displeasure when, for any of the reasons mentioned above, a Blu-ray release is not up to
par.
. . . Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com |
