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Are on-line reviews of Blu-ray discs really reviews or just another level of QC?

With Blu-ray the expectations of home cinema enthusiasts have been raised and on-line reviewers are becoming more and more eagle eyed and knowledgeable about the format and passionate about the titles they are reviewing.

For the real enthusiast, the purchase of a Blu-ray disc could be the fourth time they have purchased a title.  Blu-ray was preceded by VHS, Laserdisc and DVD with each new format promising the best picture and sound quality.

Sometimes, people’s expectations are unrealistic, but in most instances there is no reason why a properly mastered title should not equal the cinema experience in your home.

With the advent of DVD & Blu-ray review websites and forums, titles being released today are given almost an additional QC by the reviewer.

These things are regularly picked up in the reviews:

• The presence of film grain and the director’s intent
• DNR (Digital Noise Reduction), EE (Edge Enhancement) and the battle to educate the “Playstation 3″ generation that films in high definition shouldn’t always look like High Definition Sport shot on Video.
• The use of screen grabs to highlight issues and whether the saving of the image to a ‘lossy’ format like JPEG skews the validity of the image.
• The use of screen grabs in general to highlight an issue which may or may not occur for just 1/24th of a second.

If you work in Video Compression for a living, you may wish to avoid the following websites as they pick your precious work to pieces!!

The AV Science Forum – Blu-ray Software:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=150

Michael Mackenzie’s Land of Whimsy:
http://www.landofwhimsy.com/archives/bd-impressions/