Unless the film was mastered poorly, you are totally, utterly, undeniably wrong. Sorry, but film has WAY more resolution than 1080p provides. Certainly a few films might not have a proper negative available for a great master, but making a sweeping claim that older films won't look benefit is absurd.

Arrrrrrgggghhhhh!!!!!

This is really a problem with people getting used to seeing things shot in HD compared to film. Film even in HD looks like film and some film will be softer or grainier or whatever. It does not look like things shot on HD video. I think that is where some of the perception comes in that old films won't look better. Technically all film should look better, but I can definitely see where to many it won't pop the way HD filmed things like sporting events do. I think this could be a major issue and it did come up at the HD demo with some people walking away completely unimpressed with HD DVD and Blu-ray.

It sounds like you're not interested in high-definition at all, then, which makes me wonder why you're wasting your time on this forum.

I was an EARLY DVD adopter and have had no regrets beyond my first player costing me $700 and then not working a year or two later. Either way I do plan on waiting a little. I was planning on atleast waiting until Christmas/New Year and see how things are going then before jumping on the bandwagon. It's hard though! I think Mr. Hunt is right BUT I don't knock the guys jumping on right now. It's a good thing as these will be the folks that show us screen caps, etc. so I welcome it.

I second that.

My god.

Will some people NEVER learn?

Plus...Knight Rider looks amazing compared to broadcast tv. It looks like film.

Some people really have no idea what they're talking about.

I saw a few minutes of Jaws: The Revenge on Universal's HD channel and it looked amazing. It was only a few minutes because the movie obviously sucks ass.

HBO HD also had The Hunt for Red October on a few weeks ago and it too looked excellent. I haven't been able to watch anything older than those movies in HD, but both are around 15 years old. HD definitely can improve what you're watching.

It's been a while since Universal HD showed them, but they had several Hammer films...and these are movies from the '60s...where the quality was comparable to nearly every "modern" film I've seen in high definition.

Watched Jaws The Revenge all the way through. Awesome.

Was Red October in OAR, by chance? Probably not.

The fact is that film will always have a greater resolution so it can ALWAYS look better no matter when it was made. Some people can't get that through their heads.

Actually, Red October was in OAR. Surprised me, since HBO usually crops everything. I've noticed they have shown more stuff in OAR recently. Titanic, Ocean's Twelve, and Red October were shown in OAR. And there was one or two others recently that were also displayed correctly, but I can't remember which movies.

Showtime usually does OAR for their films. Saw looks awesome in HD. I watch Crash in HD last week and it looked just superb. But I think they may have cropped that one. I think the film was shot in 2.35:1 and the screen was filled.

Yes, HBO-HD has been doing a MUCH BETTER job with OAR in the last few months. I also saw Crocodile Dundee in full 2.35:1 on HBO-HD a few weeks back. I was stunned that it was in full widescreen (print looked nice, but obviously no cleanup had been done). Maybe they had a meeting and changed some things, maybe they hired someone new to run the division, etc. All I know is, OAR is the way to go and they should do it all the time. Not there yet, but definitely getting better in the last few months.

I think it may be the opposite -- they did a much better job in the early days of HBO-HD, and when they show movies in OAR, they're often older transfers from closer to the channel's inception...from before they took that OAR-or-die approach. It's very rare to find a recent addition to their schedule in OAR. Lion's Gate titles often are 2.35:1 when appropriate, and Ocean's Twelve was letterboxed as well, but those are definitely the exceptions.

That's different from what I heard. They've always been showing things in a MAR. It's good news that they're starting to do this.

Started watching Judge Dredd on HBOHD last night, it looked OAR, but I'm not sure [it was somewhat windowpaned, so it wasn't exactly 16:9]. House IV, from Sho-HD, was 4:3, though I don't know if that was OAR [was House IV direct-to-video?] or if it was cropped.
Judge Dredd looked sweet, I could see the moistness on Rob Schneider's eyes [not that I'm normally gazing at his eyes]. House IV looked like crap.

Anyway, I'm going to wait. I haven't seen HDDVD/BluRay in action yet, I would hope/assume it is a noticeable improvement. I'm not an early adopter, I always wait till there's at least one hardware price drop, and of course a decent amount of content I'm interested in. And I've still got hundreds of hours of DVD content to view.

It is not a noticeable improvement over HD channels, unless the channel is REALLY bad. It is the same technology, just stored on a disc.

Sounds like House IV may have been an upconvert.

To an extent it should be, there definitely should not be the pixelization that happens due to a broadcast.

Its definitely a bit better than HBO HD looks to me, but I won't claim its a night and day difference and it will vary greatly by film and how much the cable provider is compressing the signal.

Comcast in my area compresses the signal to death and I get a good amount of blocking. After watching Phantom of the Opera last night on HD-DVD I can tell a definate difference compared to the HBO-HD braodcast. Not to metion that the DVD is also in OAR, while HBO is not.

I looked at about a minute of 'Knight Rider" on Universal HD and changed the channel since the picture was cropped to 16X9. Not acceptable. I have noticed that they are beginning to show more 2:35 to 1 movies though, so that's a good sign.

Fry's had a couple of the HD-DVD movies marked $19.99 yesterday, but with such a poor selection, I'm not yet interested. The demo looked excellent, though.

Knight Rider isn't cropped. It was originally filmed. That's OAR.

Resized HD image:

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4249/s1e1kr119no.jpg

4x3 on DVD:

http://www.davidhasselhoffonline.com/Phoenix1.jpg

It's cropped.

There's more information on the side of the HD. That means it's open matte most likely. Regardless, it was still originally filmed.

It probably wasn't shot widescreen. The film frame (usually) is roughly 4x3. It takes some tricks (either mattes or anamorphic lenses) to get a widescreen image. That nearly all films since the advent of widescreen have used those tricks doesn't make the natural OAR of film widescreen.

Stuff originally filmed for television (especially in the 1980s) probably did not use mattes or anamorphic lenses and then later cropped the image to fill the 4x3 screen for broadcast. They probably just shot it using the full frame, making the widescreen version cropped.

Again, the widescreen version above shows more image on the right side.

Edit: actually, both sides do.

Universal HD is usually very good about having it in the right format. I only got the channel during the Olympics, but everything I saw during that time was OAR and looked great. Knight Rider is open matte I believe (like T3).

Scarface in HD was great.