Extended Lord of the Rings Blu-rays to hit Blighty

@Jessica Werkz

Your post on here suggested that according to the Which article, people were buying BluRay discs and receiving DVDs instead, with an adjusted White Balance. There was a claim that the suppliers knew this and yet had received no complaints. I was not saying that I didn't believe you, but as an owner of several BluRays (some still unwatched) I wanted to know which 12 were really DVD discs so that I could kick up a stink and get my money back!

The first few words in the "pub trash talk" comment asked if you had read the article yourself. I asked this because Which articles can be notoriously unavailable to non-subscribers, thus preventing us from going back to source and validating your comments (and finding out which of our discs may really be DVDs).

The only Which article relating to BluRay / DVD comparisons online (which I linked to) painted a different picture to your comment. The discs received *were not DVDs* although for several of them (8 from 17 tested, not 12 as per your comment) the improvement in quality was not really significant or noticable when compared to the DVD. This is different from saying that the consumer had received a DVD in a BluRay case!

The Which article that I found did not backup your claims, which is why I had hoped that you would confirm whether or not the online article in question was the same as was in the printed article. You say you know what you read, but if it was the article I linked to, then it appears that you are giving a false impression of what you read.

Five of the discs tested were found to be "outstanding [...] far superior to their DVD equivalents". From the remaining 12 (is that where your figure came from?), four were found to be "a significant improvement on BluRay [...] significantly better than the DVD versions".

Of the remaining 8 discs, "A significant proportion of the Blu-ray discs on test failed to offer a significant improvement over their DVD equivalents, even though they tended to look superior. In some cases this was thanks to the high-quality picture of the DVD itself."

So the BluRays tended to look superior to the DVDs, although the improvement was not actually great enough to justify buying the BluRay over the DVD.

At the end of the day, while not supporting your claims, this article doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. i.e. that money grabbing studios will rush out any old shit transfer on to BluRay and sell it for £25 to try and con gullible Joe Public out of his hard earned beer tokens. It was the same when DVDs first came out, and it will be the same when the next technology emerges. Caveat Emptor!