I’m queer for Blurays of classic black-and-white films. Until recently I’ve never believed that I could get Bluray quality out of digital high-def streaming, but I’m now convinced that Vudu is a reasonably good delivery system for that. And they claim to have significantly more high-def movies in their library than anyone else. And that their new films are available day-and-date with DVD releases. And I feel that the quality is pretty good. Not perfect but commendable for the most part.
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There’s no Bluray for John Frankehheimer‘s Seven Days in May (’64) and until yesterday I’d never seen it in high-def on a video monitor, but Vudu delivers a very satisfying high-def version — rich, sharp and silvery. I also watched a high-def version of Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment at Nuremberg (’61), and found it mostly satisfying. And yet a Vudu high-def version of From Here To Eternity (which is coming out on Bluray in a few weeks) didn’t look as robust and gleaming as a high-def rendering on TCM that I caught last spring. And a high-def Vudu viewing of Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach looks good texture-wise but is presented — horrors! — in 1.78 rather than 1.66 (which is how it’s presented on the old DVD). So that’a demerit.
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