WWII In Hi Def Disc 2 Blu-ray (Rental)

Product Description For the first time on Blu-ray, watch 10 of America's most important historical films in high definition from the U.S. National Archives' collection of World War II (color and black and white) films in WWII in HD. See the short and, the newly released, long version of legendary filmmaker John Ford's Oscar-winning film, December 7th, on the attack on Pearl Harbor and watch intense footage from the Nuremberg Trials in Nuremberg with almost no editorial comment at all. Relive an amphibious landing in With the Marines in Tarawa, and see the Oscar-winning documentary, The Battle of Midway, by John Ford and the lost masterpiece, Let There Be Light, hailed as one of the greatest war films ever. Review For those consumers having play back issues please look into updating your firmware. Firmware upgrades can also enable new features and playback capabilities. Most manufacturers are constantly upgrading the firmware for their Blu- ray players in response to customer feedback and to improve performance. Therefore most players need to be updated frequently to stay up to date with these upgrades/changes. --Author/Publisher An amazing collection of documentaries from the U.S. National Archives is featured on this superlative four disc set. I am more than impressed with this new four disc set of WWII in Hi Def from Topics featuring a slew of documentaries culled from the National Archives. While there are a couple of niggling complaints I have no liner notes or insert booklet and packaging which stacks the four discs on a single spindle, as well as a very minor authoring error which will display Disc One as Disc Two and vice versa on your introductory PS3 screen if you use that system they pale when one considers the breadth and depth of material contained herein. Though you wouldn't know by the rather minimal listing on the back of the keepcase insert, this compilation includes several Oscar winners for Best Documentary, at least a couple of notably notorious releases (at least back in their day), and a who's who of (uncredited) Hollywood royalty in front of and behind the camera, people like John Ford, John and Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, Alfred Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin and more. As with any compilation which spans this much material and various source elements, WWII in Hi Defs VC-1 encoded 1080p image (in 1.38:1) varies considerably. The good news is the vast majority of these ten features look pretty darned amazing in their hi-def upgrades, as long as you keep in mind many of these were originally shot on either 16mm or 35mm under battle conditions which frequently resulted in early exposure or damage to the actual negative. The Technicolor features included here are a tad on the soft side, though with fairly robust and well saturated color for something of this age. Aside from the short version of December 7 and Nuremberg, the black and white features look very good, with excellent contrast and generally very stable blacks. All of these features sport occasional (and sometimes more than occasional) blemishes, with scratches, dirt, white flecks and other debris dotting the image. But taking the historical import of these features into consideration, as well as their age, the image quality here for the most part is most definitely a pleasant surprise. Two audio options are included on these Blu-rays, a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix and a Dolby Digital 2.0 mix (strangely the discs default to the Dolby mix--when are distributors going to figure out most Blu-ray consumers want lossless audio and will choose that mix if given the choice?). For the most part all of these features sound good to very good, within the confines of early 1940s recording techniques. A couple of the features have fairly badly damaged audio, including Battle of Midway, which easily fares the worst sound wise among the ten features included here. The short form December 7 also has some audio damage. The rest of the features, while boxy and lacking either extreme highs or lows, feature decent to excellent fidelity, albeit with hiss and the occasional pop and crack. This is an astoundingly fine set from Topics, and kudos to the label and the producers who assembled this excellent collection of documentaries. Anyone with even a passing interest in World War II and the United States filmed history of it should have this set in their collections. Highly recommended. --Jeffrey Kauffman, Bluray.com