High-res LotR

We all kinda know that DVD resolutions and compression rates are crappy. But it’s astounding how quickly we forget just how crappy it is if we haven’t seen the theater version for a while. This week, TNT is showing 1080i versions of the three Lord of the Rings movies, so I streamed the 1080i signal to my laptop and took a few screen captures to compare them to the 480p version stored on DVD.

Nice.

It’s still not the kinda stuff that will turn me into an early adaptor for HD-DVD/BluRay players (I’ll wait for my PS3 instead). But for somebody who’s been referencing the DVDs very often and got used to the DVD quality, this is a neat little reminder of how much better the movie actually looks.
Here’s a couple of comparison shots. You thought that the title font of the three movies was just plain white? Look again. And it’s nice to see all the hard work the WETA artists put into Gollum’s skin shading in (most of) its glory again.

A few things to keep in mind:

• I used software decoders to take all shots, a hardware solution as found in BluRay players will produce a better picture.
• I saved the shots in JPEG to cut down on bandwidth. I used the highest quality setting, though, so it should look about as good as the originals.
• TNT zoomed in on the picture to fill out the 16:9 frame, so there’s some scaling going on.
• Finally, it’s an interlace signal, which looks better in motion than in stills.

After I did all of this I noticed that somebody else has already done a more comprehensive comparison here. Definitely worth visiting.