VIEW: High-Def DVD Gallery

Welcome to the first installment of PREMIERE's High-Definition DVD Consumer Guide, a monthly look at DVDs manufactured in the high-definition Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD formats. This is a format war we hoped would never happen, but as it heats up, and as more large-screen plasma and LCD displays sell, and more high-definition product comes into the market, we figured it was high-time to begin a feature to clue in our fellow cinephiles as to what's the best stuff out there in 1080p land.

And what is 1080p land, you might ask? Well, 1080p stands for "1080 progressive"; the number refers to pixels (which determine the amount of detail in a picture), while the "progressive" is opposed to "interlaced" — interlacing being how a television picture is resolved on a standard-definition set. A "progressive" picture has a lot more solidity than an interlaced picture, which is made up of two sets of lines coming together. Just to give you an idea of the difference, know that standard-definition TV resolves at either 480i or 480p. There are a few intermediate steps between 480 and 1080, but what we're going to deal with here is the highest of the high-def.

We're not going to run rehashes of movie reviews; for the purposes of this column, the quality of a given movie itself is, while not strictly secondary, potentially peripheral. You'll get a good idea of what I think of the different movies I look at here, but the big concern here is how a given movie works in high-def. Movies that I love that look fantastic in high-def — such as Ratatouille and Black Book — will naturally get my highest ratings. Movies I'm not so hot on I hope not to slag too much on account of my being not so hot on them. As you see, this debut column is a mix of newer and older releases, as will be the columns over the next few months. We're just starting in the high-def realm, and we're going to assume our readers may be, too, and that they're going to want to start their libraries based on their movie loves, not just on whatever's coming out this or next week.

The question we're not going to address right off the bat is: "Which is better, HD or Blu-ray?" Quite frankly, both formats look pretty damn great to us right now, and our brief here is to cover as many titles as possible. With both Paramount and Universal going all HD at the moment, and Disney and some others firmly behind Blu-ray, giving equal coverage to both formats is going to enable us to cover the biggest number of titles; to limit ourselves at this moment would be to, as De Niro's Jake LaMotta might say, defeat our own purpose.

Before we get started, a word on our format, and on our equipment. Letter grades might make you think we're ripping off Entertainment Weekly, but this whole Consumer Guide format, letter grades and all, was cooked up by rock critic Robert Christgau back in the late '60s, and we rip it off as a tribute to him. And also because it happens to be a damn handy format. Gear wonks wondering what we're looking at this stuff with should be reassured to learn we've got a Toshiba HD-A20 playing the HD DVDs, a Sony PS3 handling the Blu-ray; they're both going into a Pioneer VSX81TXV receiver, which outputs into a — ta-da! — Hitachi P50V701 50-inch plasma set. The main speakers are a pair of NHT VT — 1.2 towers. But I'll have to say, sound quality is only going to come up in this column when it's discernibly bad, which it almost never is anymore.

Now, let's look at some movies.