Update: Sony Pulls Release - Robocop Blu-ray Reviewed
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Confirmed from Sony, the Robocop Blu-ray has been pulled. Originally scheduled for Aug 15th, Robocop has been entirely removed from Sony’s release schedule. Here’s our original post: Our friends over at DVD Talk spin the brand new Robocop Blu-ray DVD. In looking at the video quality, it’s not good, folks. As we’ve been saying, stop pushing out high-def DVDs unless it looks “wow” and is from a solid video source. In their comparison, they state the previous Criterion edition of Robocop looks better than this version. That’s a shame. And a scam. The format war ™ is going to be a bomb without a killer showcase DVD and crap like this…
The Robocop Blu-ray is encoded in High Definition 1080p format using MPEG2 compression on a single-layer 25 gb disc. The movie is presented in its American theatrical aspect ratio of approximately 1.85:1 with tiny letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the 16:9 frame. The earlier Criterion DVD was framed for the looser 1.66:1 European theatrical ratio per director Verhoeven’s preference. In comparison, the Blu-ray’s framing is a little tight and Criterion’s is generally better, though the difference is not severe enough to compromise the movie’s compositional sense. As for other picture quality concerns, however…
Holy crap in a can, this disc looks horrible! I’ve written a couple of previous Blu-ray reviews where I’d called certain discs the worst High Definition image I’d ever seen, thinking HD couldn’t possibly get any worse, but here Sony just keeps lowering the bar for the format. The Robocop Blu-ray is U-G-L-Y. And before you write in to chastise me that, “The movie is 20 years old. What’d you expect?” or “It was a low-budget movie. It can’t look much better”, save your breath. Those are bullshit excuses and dead wrong. The problems with this disc all stem from the video transfer and the Blu-ray authoring. Robocop is not supposed to look like this. No movie is supposed to look like this.
Problem #1 is the color transfer, which is recycled from MGM’s Robocop Trilogy DVD box set. The movie had a few different releases on DVD, starting with a Criterion edition (long out of print) ported from their 1995 laserdisc. Criterion’s transfer was approved by Paul Verhoeven, but unfortunately was mastered only in non-anamorphic letterbox format. When MGM took over the distribution rights, they struck a brand new HD master without supervision or approval from anyone associated with the film, and the studio made a few questionable (let’s just use the word “terrible”) artistic decisions about how the movie should look.
Source: DVD Talk
Video Snack ™: