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.

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.