Looks like the first review of the Haloween BD and looks to be stellar!

http://www.dvdreview.com/reviews/pages/2682.shtml

I can't WAIT to get my hands on this disc (and Dawn, too).

I'm looking forward to the George Romero flicks in HD, esp. "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead."

All 4 of the Anchor Bay movies should be at my door tomorrow. So. Damn. Excited.

My review discs are sitting right here in front of me, but I'm at work, so I can't watch them. Why, god, why?!

Have you read the back of the cases 100X?

I've been clicking around on the discs, here are some early impressions:

-Evil Dead 2 is showing its low budget. More than that, it looks like edge enhancement has been applied.

-My TV is interestingly showing the episodes of Masters of Horror to be 1080i. Not sure why that would be. Overall, they look good, although each episode's style could affect that a little. Also, there's a little promo for AB Blu-ray discs, and they show a clip of Imprint, which makes me very giddy.

-Halloween, on the other hand, looks really good. It's got a very film-like presentation.

I haven't got the Romero movies, so we'll have to wait for Adam to post impressions of those.

Masters of Horror transfers are 1080i, even the case specs state as much.

You're right. They must have been mastered in 1080i for the HD cable broadcasts and Anchor Bay didn't bother to redo them. Either way, it doesn't affect the image, as they look very good.

I was wondering when we were going to start seeing less-than-1080p discs popping up. Heaven help us if they start releasing anything in 720p.

There have been a few other 1080i discs, and some of the Digital Playground porn titles have been 720p. The 1080i discs aren't that big of a deal, as any 1080p TV should be deinterlacing the 1080i signal into 1080p, anyway. The 720p discs are lower in quality, obviously, but Digital Playground has now gone completely 1080. I can't really think of too many other 720p releases. It's not a very good selling point, and I'm guessing the reason those initial DP releases were 720p is only because they were originally shot in 720p.

Never really understood the importance of having porn in HD - I guess thats as close as youd get to being with these women or men, and in some cases... thats a plus. lol

I'm sure HD really shows some serious flaws!

How are the colors? They didn't re-use the miscolored Divimax master, did they?

From what I've read on other forums, it's the Divimax transfer retimed to more closely resemble the Cundey-approved transfer from the THX release from '99.

Well, that's where things get complicated. If the data on the disc is encoded as 1080p24 frames (like most HD DVDs and Blu-rays), the player can decode and output 1080i and your TV will still be able to reconstruct the orginal frames losslessly with a simple reverse 3:2 deinterlacing cadence.

But if the disc is encoded as 1080i interlaced fields, half the data to reconstruct the original frames is literally missing, so the TV (or disc player) will be forced to employ motion adaptive deinterlacing, and the results may vary depending on the quality of the deinterlacing chip.

It may not be a big deal in the end, but if the show was shot on film it's a real shame they didn't strike a 1080p24 master.

Huh. Unfortunately, most of the Divimax discs I've seen had liberally-applied edge enhancement.

I did not know that. Thanks for the info. Makes me a little annoyed then that they didn't bother to give us a 1080p transfer for the Masters of Horror discs.

As for Halloween, it's got the correct colors and it looks excellent. In fact, I just submitted my review of that particular disc, so it should be up as soon as it gets approved.

Up now: http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=30580

Sweet. Thanks, Adam!

Great review, I'm definitely picking this one up! If only it had the extra scenes from the TV version, it would be just about perfect, but I'll just hold onto my old TV version DVD then and gladly toss out my "Divimax" edition DVD....

I'm guessing that the scenes shot for TV are only available on video. They'd probably have to go back to the original negatives and strike a new print to get those scenes in order to master them for HD.

They did that for the 2-disc release in '99. I'd assume they still have those same elements handy.

(The quality of the TV stuff is remarkable...in the same league as the movie proper.)

Oh, did they? I haven't seen Anchor Bay's release of the TV cut. Well, in that cast, they're probably saving it for the first of many double dips, I'm sure.

...And here's my Evil Dead II review:
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=30592

Well, bad news, gang. I was perusing AVS and saw a post that pretty convincingly details that Halloween does not in fact use the Cundey approved transfer from 1999. It's not as bad as the Divimax transfer, but the colors aren't exact to the older image. I've amended my review to note this fact, and will add any other developments that may pop up. Personally, I think the colors still look very good, they're just not 100% perfect, but the overall image quality is still fantastic. Just thought you would all want to know.