I just got my Blu-ray copy in the mail today. This movie is one of the most talked film in the Blu-ray community because of the amazing video quality. I first heard about it in an article when Roger Ebert said, "The reason to own a blu-ray player". I played it tonight, watching on my 60" Sony HDTV in DTS-HD soundtrack. I was completely blown away by the first scene where a snow monkey in Japan sits calmly in a hot springs, amazing shot, crystal clear, better than being there. Throughout the film, there's no dialog, no spoken word, captures of 24 countries, beautiful imagery, various religions doing their natural rituals. There are scenes of skulls in the Cambodia killing fields, Cambodian family riding on bike in slowmo, India people taking baths, Chinese factories - thousands of women producing cigarettes, burning oil in Kuwait, dancing rituals, and many uses of time-lapse photography.

This movie transfer blows away all big budget Hollywood movies because of the picture quality. The colors are fantastic, they stand out yet done the contrast is not overdone. The sharpness, you can see objects, textures, people clearly from far distances - I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of feets away and it's still sharp. This is truly reference quality.

How did they make this film so good looking? They filmed this in 1992 using 70mm film. They then used a scanner (present time) and scanned it at 8K (8192 pixels wide) first to do in the industry. HDTV full resolution is 1920 x 1080. Then down-sampled it to 1080 for Blu-ray. So imagine a 5 megapixel digital picture, you view it on the computer at 100%, you see some grain and overall image not so good, but you zoom out or shrink the image and see it's much clearer. Pretty much the same concept. The result is amazing.

I highly recommend anyone with a Blu-ray player to buy this film, on Blu-ray of course. DVD was released years ago. It's the one Blu-ray that I'll be watching over and over.
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