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Well, I really think for those of you who pre-order...you take a chance. If you wanna be the first to get the recent release, then you're gonna pay for it. Which is why I don't pre-order anything unless it's a limited edition which will sell out, and I don't mind paying gobs of cash for it.

As to Amazon not shipping something, this is certainly an issue with the studios and their distribution system. Amazon has the best shipping record I've ever seen. These guys have a logistics system which is rather admirable. It's the distributor--the studios and manufacturers who ship the product--who are to blame. Blame Sony's manufacturing plants for not having enough stock on-hand to meet the demand.

Columbia House probably got most of them, anyway.

I'm not really irritated by waiting 5 days after my card is charged for a shipped date. This is a pre-order of a product, and pre-ordering product is always a crap shoot. Hell, just pre-order something at your local retail outlet. Now we're talkin' drama and retardedness which would easily out do Amazon.

When there site says INSTOCK and yet they still havent shipped it you and your card was charged 5 to 10 days earlier then yes that is a major problem!!
luckily this time ghostbusters shipped the next day but the last order i made with them i had to wait 5 to 10 days, ( and i preorderd it months in advance when it was first listed)
I dont know about you but if someone is going to take my money they better atleast have the decency to ship imy product out the same time they take my money, not take my money and hold onto my product for a week or almost two.

I have also had issues as of late of the wrong format being shipped, getting a dvd instead of a bluray (had this issue with taken and again with my bloody valentine 3D) or getting standrd bluray when i had ordered and was charged for the bond steelbooks.

they used to have an excellent customer service record, but thats been going to crap as of late.

That's something that's going to be a point of debate for years with this format. No matter what, some people just aren't going to accept grain. Or they may accept it, but always consider it a negative that shouldn't be there. They think that because some movies are very "clean," that everything has the potential to be like that.

Just checked it out last night and while there is grain, some heavy grain in a few scenes, it does look theatrical in presentation to me and i dont mind it at all. I would rather see more sharpness and detail in the picture than it being DNR all to hell and soft.

Yep. This reminds me of The Descent where you had the "grainy" version and the DNR'd version released later. The grainy version (MPEG4 AVC) actually looks better. Not a huge difference, but significant.

I'm not complaining about film grain in general. I don't approve of DNR any more than other film enthusiasts would, but I don't think they did the kind of restoration a film like this begs for. I don't know all of the technical details to that sort of thing, but it seems to me that they could have cleaned the image up a bit more without sacrificing fine detail. Don't get me wrong, the image itself looks great in 1080p; I just wish they had done a better job with it.

There's some overuse of DNR as well...particularly in the scene where Sigorney Weaver looks out on the city (after the containment machine is turned off and all the ghosts are released and "Magic" is playing on the soundtrack). The background behind Weaver (which should be a whitish blue) looks like a screen door from the overuse of DNR.

That said, however, I'm fairly pleased with the Blu-ray, although I wish the grain level was more consistent between scenes (but that probably has more to do with the film master's inconsistency than the people who worked on the release).

Are you positive it didn't look like that theatrically? Just curious.

I don't think Ghostbusters ever had an insanely crisp presentation, for numerous reasons. I really don't think they would have just touched a few key moments in the film with DNR.

Agreed, I think if it was pin sharp it wouldn't look like an eighties film. And to me that is alot of the charm of this film.

I'm so glad this has finally been re-released, and on blu-ray! This is a great time to be a fan of Ghostbusters. With this, the game that just came out, and the Real Ghostbusters volume 1 on dvd, I could hardly ask for anything more!

I still haven't checked mine out yet. I may wait for the Sci-Fi watching contest on here due to start next month. Hmm...

Got mine from Amazon for $9, but no slipcover, dangit!

Same here, but they can keep the slip cover at this price.

You can have my slipcover and send me $10.

Haha, I didn't even know there was a slipcover until I saw a video review of the disc. I'll live...

Just got my order the other day from amazon and it did come with the slipcover. Sorry to hear that yours did not come with it . I wanna order men in black but im scared it will not come with the slipcover yea i know kinda dumb huh lol

That's what I was thinking. I'll live.

Guess you haven't seen Ghostbusters.

Well, I saw it in the theatre in 1984.

Nope, don't own it and don't plan to. I am well aware their track record is not perfect. What I said is I've yet to be seriously disappointed.

If I had to rank the majors, I'd concur with Mr. Tyner that they rank the best and Universal the worst.

Everything I've read about Ghostbuster's indicates there is nothing 'wrong' with the transfer at all and that's how it was intended to look. Of course some people want everything dvnr'd to death to remove all traces of grain, and then the result is something like the Predator 'remaster' which looks awful.

Here are two reviews of the transfer. One from Robert Harris who I trust knows a thing or two about film.

"The HD video master of Ivan Reitman's 1984 Ghostbusters had the input of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, and as such must be considered incontestable as far as a Blu-ray is concerned.

Those who saw the film theatrically 25 years ago, may or may not recall that the look varied from sequence to sequence. While some interiors seemed to have a pushed, grainy look, fully exposed exteriors appeared to have far less apparent grain. Some of the film is sharp, some parts lesser so.

Created from an archival 35mm interpositive, what has been delivered via Blu-ray is Ghostbusters as it originally looked, and I couldn't be happier.

I'm certain that there will be some who will find the grain too course, to evident, too brown, too angular, not pretty enough, or in one of my favorite phrases, simply about one would expect from an old (read: antique) film from a bygone era.

Love it or hate, this is Ghostbusters as created and released in 1984."


http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/28...ers-in-blu-ray

And another review that also mentions the image quality but gives it high marks despite the heavy grain.

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Ghostb...-Blu-ray/3661/

So I think Sony is doing a great job presenting films as they should look on Blu-ray unlike some studios that love to destroy the quality of the image to placate those who hate grain and expect everything to 'pop' off the screen at them in a misguided understanding of what 'HD' is.

Josh is hardly one of those people, though, and he has hundreds upon hundreds of reviews to prove it.

To be completely honest, I remember the arguments about Ghostbusters more than I do my own reaction, so I can't really argue these points myself (and don't recall if I ever argued them?). The central complaint as I remember it is that the contrast was heavily boosted, and that ravaged the way the film grain looks, threw out fine detail, botched the colors, etc. The argument goes that the grain in and of itself wasn't the problem but rather the way it was misrepresented. They didn't want the grain removed; they wanted just the film grain to look like film grain.

My even more limited understanding of what's wrong with Ghostbusters is something to the effect of, they did some things wrong on the remastered version (the one bundled with Ghostbusters II). When it came time to do the Blu-Ray release, they fixed some of these things, but they didn't start at the beginning, they started with what they had created when they did the remastered version, and thus, although it may look better than the last DVD, it's still a heavily "corrected" transfer as opposed to a transfer done correctly from the beginning. Also, Kovacs was actually dead by the time they created the Blu-Ray. He was present when they did the DVD, so the Blu-Ray is only approved by Kovacs in theory.

All things considered, I do think people exaggerate the flaws with Ghostbusters to an extent. It is undeniably a high-definition transfer with great colors, and easily trumps any of the SD-DVD or even VHS presentations of the film I watched over the years. In terms of someone watching the film, I cannot agree that it is a train wreck.

I did see Ghostbusters in theaters recently, which Sony was claiming was a new 2k remaster. There was once mentions of plans a few years ago to convert it to 3D. Merits of that effort aside, maybe Sony went back and did the process from the beginning to have the cleanest possible master from which to do the conversion. I don't remember the theatrical presentation looking the same as the Blu-Ray, but I hadn't watched my Blu in over a year when I saw it in theaters.

That's good to know.

I recall the problems with that dvd release you mention which did look pretty bad from the screen captures I saw that were very boosted in contrast. I wasn't aware of how exactly the Blu-ray transfer was created, but based on the Robert Harris comments among others, I assumed it was a better transfer than that last dvd release since they seemed to agree it was a film like transfer with no obvious amount of dvnr among other 'enhancements', even though people would complain about the way the transfer looks.

So I haven't followed the transfer debate since then, and assumed people were just complaining about it being a grainy transfer that varies from scene to scene.

As much as I respect Robert Harris, he sometimes falls off the mark. This and Bram Stoker's Dracula are a couple of those times.

Sony's old DVD edition of Ghostbusters from the early days of the format looked pretty dim and drab. Sony later retransfered the movie for the Double Feature Gift Set in 2005 (the one with the green slime artwork) with severely boosted contrast and colors. It looked awful.

In order to "correct" this for the Blu-ray, Sony simply took the 2005 master and had the contrast and colors pulled down electronically. However, this is not a true fix. Detail in bright areas that was crushed due to the contrast boost cannot be restored. It's gone forever. This is a big problem toward the end of the movie, during the "When someone asks you if you're a god" scene. Detail is crushed to oblivion in the bright light and smoke.

The grain is artificially exaggerated and looks very nasty all through the movie, not film-like at all. The gamma is also seriously out of whack, which makes some of the optical effects transparent. For example, there's one shot looking down at a street from the top of a building, with a gargoyle in the foreground. You can see the street through the gargoyle. If this had been transferred correctly, the gargoyle would be dark enough to block the image behind it.

What Sony should have done was retransfer the movie from the film elements and start over from scratch. The 2005 master was too compromised and was not a viable candidate for Blu-ray.

Compare this movie to Fox's release of Big Trouble in Little China, a movie that was made in much the same visual style and with the same SFX processes as Ghostbusters. That movie looks amazing on Blu-ray. Ghostbusters is a travesty.

I can't blame Sony for what happened to Bram Stoker's Dracula. That was really the fault of Zoetrope.