http://imdb.com/title/tt1080585/

210 minutes

So the region 2 set comes without the briefcase then?

The UK R2 set is a 5-disc sans briefcase. However, the Spanish R2 set does contain the briefcase.

Has anyone heard just how "limited" the briefcase sets are. I'm wondering if my HD-DVD version that is preordered from amazon will arrive by Christmas. I assume it would as long as they have them in stock.

I am anxiously awaiting my shipping notice from Amazon for my briefcase.

And no one knows how limited they are yet.

My 5-disc HD version shipped from Best Buy today. I got it back when I bought an HD player. They have been really good about shipping this and Bourne III the Thursday before release day.

Two excellent reasons to keep your 1997 DVD of the Director's Cut:

1. It's the only version that is slightly pillarboxed in anamorphic widescreen so that most viewers will see a wider picture than in any other version, after overscanning caused by most TV monitors.
2. It's the last version (with the 2006 limited edition of the Director's Cut) to preserve the original colour values. The Final Cut is following current fashion trends by skewing everything towards blue-green.

ordered in august from amazon. looked in my history and says this will ship around december 28.
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Having seen it in the theatre, nothing about it skewed towards current film or fashion trends. I didn't notice any of that blue-green stuff that's in the captures.

You have seen the Final Cut in a theatre?!

Even if you have and the colours were normal, we have to believe the evidence of the screen caps for the DVD transfer, don't we?

I guess the idea is if you make everyone look like a corpse that has just been fished out of the river, it'll be harder to tell the replicants from the human beings.:)

That version is presented on Disc Three, isn't it?

Yes, but God only knows what they did to the colours. They are new transfers after all. All three versions on disc three should be similar in that they used branching technology to weave in and out of the different versions (theatrical, international and director's cut). dvdbeaver has posted these screen caps which show them to be identical to each other - and somewhat marginally more realistic in their flesh tones than the Final Cut:

FINAL CUT:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...disc/Final.jpg

THEATRICAL CUT:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...20PDVD_007.jpg

INTERNATIONAL CUT:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...20PDVD_008.jpg

DIRECTOR'S CUT:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...20PDVD_009.jpg

... but still a long way from the original transfer. This is how the same still looks in the Director's Cut 1999 DVD transfer: Realistic flesh tones, blue tuxedo (not black) and textured écru silk shirt (not flat, white, drab, urine-soaked or greyish). A real person in a real suit, not a corpse in a fish tank.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDRev...20Bitmap-8.jpg

Picked up the Blu-Ray version at Best Buy in LA yesterday and went through the Final Cut this afternoon and the Dangerous Days documentary yesterday night.

To be honest, the documentary is a bit bloated. At three hours and thirty minutes, it's just too long and looses focus when it goes off on tangents that aren't that interesting. I'm not saying it isn't an informative documentary. It is. I'm just saying that it could've been trimmed by an hour and I still don't think you would've lost any important information.

The best featurette on the set is "All Our Variants Futures" where it picks up right where Dangerous Days left off about the resurrection of Blade Runner on home video and the restoration of the film. At 28 minutes, it's just fabulous...very imformative. The attention to detail on the restoration and fixing of flaws is spectacular.

As for the Final Cut, it's great. I've never been a hardcore fan of Blade Runner but I appreciated the film over the years and have come to admire it in some respects while still question it in others, but the final cut went along way for me to appreciate it's place in film history. This is the preferred version.

I still have disc four to go over with all those featurettes. I don't think I really have a use for disc three with the three different cuts via seamless branching. I might look at them much, much later after I go over the Close Encounters Blu-Ray set.

Still, one of the great DVD sets so far. It's up there with The Ultimate Matrix Collection, the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions, the Prequel Trilogy, and the Alien Quadrilogy when it comes to informative information and presentation on all levels.

As this DVDBeaver comparison notes, the original DC DVD was cropped on the sides, in addition to being pillarboxed. At the worst, you'll end up losing to overscan what the original DC lacked completely, in terms of image.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDRev...laderunner.htm

What makes you so certain that the DC DVDs preserved the film's original color values?

That 1997 DVD transfer looks really, really garish. The color saturation and contrast seem to be turned up way too much.

The Director's Cut on the new set also seems to match the image from the 2006 Remastered DVD exactly:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDRev...ner%201852.jpg

Interestingly, I found this "screen capture" of the HD version of the Final Cut, which seems to have been taken with a camera off a TV screen. The blue suit looks much more vibrant here than on the DVD capture:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...y/IMG_8833.jpg

The HD pic suggests that maybe the new transfers were optimized for viewing on an actual TV, instead of being picked apart on PC monitors.

Giving credit where credit is due, all image captures (including those baracine used) are from these links:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDRev...laderunner.htm
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...ner-4-disc.htm
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...HD_Blu-ray.htm

Gee, you mean Baracine is using inaccurate images to blow things out of proportion again!? Say it ain't so. :D

Here we go again... I gave the source of my screen captures in my original post. And how do I know they are the right colours? Because in 1982, no one had even heard of blue-green colourless films à la Van Helsing. The transfer authors are just following fashion trends and trying to make a 1982 film look like one of today's lifeless colourless CGI atrocities.

In this shot from the HD transfer ( http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...D_Blu-ray.htm), the shirt shouldn't be white to begin with since it is directly lit by a spectacular yellow-orange sunset (now a spectacular blue-green sunset, thanks to modern technology) and it should be textured not flat:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...y/IMG_8833.jpg

Disclaimer: I am not disputing that the new transfers are higher-resolution, higher-bitrate, less blotchy, less contrasty and have less edge enhancement. I'm talking about colour values.

That's almost as impossible as getting them to understand the difference between "less" and "fewer".

Color tinting of films dates back to the silent age. Before digital grading, cinematographers could use different filters, film stock, or development chemicals to achieve the desired color effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematography#The_lab

The "transfer authors" were likely following the directions of the film's director, Ridley Scott, who personally supervised the creation of the Final Cut.

The shot from the HD transfer was obviously taken with a digital camera off a TV. It's not OAR, and the light levels aren't correct. It's also a shrunken image, not at the same resolution as HD. Viewed in person, there likely is texture and less white to the image.

The color values seem way off in the 1997 DVD as well, way to saturated. The remastered Directors Cut from last year's DVD and this year's set have much better color tones while still not having the blue-green tint present in the Final Cut. And you can still see the texture on his shirt.

Obviously? There is absolutely nothing on this site to indicate that these are anything but genuine screen captures: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...HD_Blu-ray.htm

As a matter of fact, it says, in giant letters:

And, of course, as far as I'm concerned, Ridley Scott is perfectly free to make a special 3D glow-in-the dark mauve and violet edition of his film if he thinks it will make him hip again and bring back his talent.

All of DVD Beaver's HD-review "screen captures" are taken with a digital camera off a screen, just as Jay G. describes.

In fact, if you click "Save Picture As..." on the DVD Beaver screenshot of Blade Runner above, and check the file properties summary, you'll see it's been taken with a Canon Powershot A620 and tagged as such.

I stand corrected. But why would that particular shot be the only unreliable one in terms of colour, brightness, texture, aspect ratio, etc. in the whole series?

Are you talking about the other screenshots above from the same scene? They are captures directly from the DVD, exact digital replicas.

Any idea why dvdneaver would mix camera shots and computer screenshots in the same presentation?

Anyway, as I said before, I don't care if Ridley Scott comes up with a CR-DIOTE (cosmic-ray direct imprint on the eyeballs) ultra-definition outside-the-colour-spectrum Post-apocapytic Cut where Rachael really is Tyrell's niece and stands to inherit after all, I'm keeping my 1997 (copyrighted 1999 in Canada) DVD transfer. Which doesn't mean I might not double-dip for the extras...

I don't think they do? The HD review of Blade Runner has camera shots, the DVD review(s) have computer captures.