It looks so smooth and purdy.

Compression artifacts =/= color timing.

Compression artifacts =/= digital noise reduction.

That's our point. When was the last time you honest-to-god saw a compression artifact on a Blu-ray? One that you can spot while watching the movie, not just in a screenshot magnified to 300%?

Compression artifacts don't have to be visible to the naked eye for the video bitrate (or lack thereof) to have an impact on image quality. With a ~ 3-hour movie at ~ 18mbps, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to anticipate that the high-frequency filtration that is visible may have been used on the master in order to avoid visible compression artifacts (at that low bitrate). The end result is not visible compression artifacts, but reduced image definition/detail.

^ Right. Bitrate still matters in 2013, encoders are more efficient, but miracles can't be performed... At 18 Mbit/sec, too much high-frequency information is thrown away and can't be recovered... DNR is the attempted "recovery" and it fails miserably...

You're putting the cart before the horse. The issue is the (alleged) DNR, not the bit rate.

Skipped through a few chapters tonight- Doesn't look nearly as bad (color-wise) as I was expecting based on the screencaps that are out there. Some scenes (like the 4th of July party) do look unnaturally pushed to me in the blues- but the film as a whole is a lot more natural and nuanced than the impression I was getting from the caps.
As far as DNR and bitrates go, I'm not even going to get into that. I have no idea if a significantly higher bit rate would have yielded an appreciable difference in finer detail. I don't know that it is there to extract. This was extremely widescreen, but not a large format. I would expect you hit the wall early on this one. There is definitely not the sensation that this has been scrubbed to death or saddled with overzealous DNR- not at all. The image still has a very fine texture to it. Yeah the finest detail isn't always there- but not because it's been smoothed away. It may be the bit rate infringing on the highest frequency detail- but if that were the case, I doubt I would be getting the sense of grain as often as I did.

As a fan of the film, and someone who hasn't seen it for over ten years, I'm happy to have it in my collection again. And, being one of the all-time great films to me, the best it's ever looked is good enough even if it's not going to slay ever other vintage catalog titles out there.

It looks fine. We've been spoiled by the stellar transfers for movies like Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, etc, that when one comes along that's just okay, we get bent out of shape. So while it's not a fancy crystal-clear transfer that looks like it was shot yesterday, it looks fine, appropriately film-like with a good amount of grain and more or less what an HD version of a film this vintage should look like.

Is it worth upgrading from the DVD?

Yes. It should have been a much better release but it is at the very least an improvement over the dvd versions.

It looks MILES better than the dvd. If it looked like an upscale of the dvd, then it would be getting scores of 1 or so. It looks like a decent HD blu-ray of an old movie, no more, no less.

Thanks, I will pick it up. Now I will have it on Laser Disc, DVD and Blu-Ray.

For what it's worth, Robert Harris says nice things about the disc:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/topi...pe-in-blu-ray/

Yeah I'm picking this up. This will be a blind buy for me but you guys have me excited.

For $5 with the U&S at Best Buy, it's a no-brainer to get.