Well it finally happened... now you can get your hands on relfecting skin on blu ray from germany...its supposedly region free, is widescreen and has 5.1 english audio. happy holidays. Anyone who has a copy please discuss the quality.
shareThe quality seems to be awful judging from the comments on amazon.de.
"The image quality is by far the worst that I have ever come across in HD movies."
Use google translate:
http://www.amazon.de/Reflecting-Skin-Schrei-Stille-Blu-ray/dp/B002QZYLFW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291950937&sr=1-2
I have the BD, and while it's not great, it's far from the "VHS quality" some of those reviews mention. It seems to be taken from a wobbly German theatrical print rather than the negative, and the transfer's a bit too dark and high-contrast (particularly in interior scenes), but generally it's fine for what it is. Since it may still be quite a while until the film gets any better, I'd say go for it if you can get it cheap.
Give a thousand monkeys a thousand laptops and they'd all be writing their stupid opinions on IMDB.
I just finished watching the blu ray, and I can say that it's very good concidering. What I mean by that is the film is clearly a low budget art film, and the resolution of blu ray brings out all of the grainy effects that most likely exist on the original negative, most of which were probably blurred together on the VHS. The pictures is very sharp and clear, and that pulls out some of the orignal source element limitations. My only real complaint, but it was on the VHS as well, is that some scenes have the audio very low in comparison to others, and dialog is almost impossible to hear without maxing out the TV. This seems to start at about the hour mark and continue to the end.
All in all I am very pleased to have purchased this blu ray disc. At least they scanned the film at the appropriate resolution to give a true full HD experience. Not unlike some of these cheap major labels who will take an existing low res DVD master and 'upconvert' that print to transfer to blu ray. What you get is nothing close to the crispness that blu ray can offer, but a slighlty improved DVD. Such films as Donnie Darko, Silence of the Lambs, and John Carpenter's The Thing have all had this hack work done. The Reflecting Skin is a full resolution transfer.
does it have English subtitles?
shareThe film is shot in English so no, there's obviously no English subtitles.
And to Rubellan: Stop making stuff up. Half the films you mention are quite clearly not upscaled. Only one or two of them are. In the case of say Silence of the Lambs an older HD scan was used. It's not fully 1080p in every single frame because they saved time making them that way when all the HD transfer was used for was 720p HD TV and for making DVD transfers. It's not upscaled though and you're seeing at least 720p at all times. To get more resolution out of this particular title they would have had to make a brand new transfer from scratch and considering the extremely low prices on blurays and how little catalog titles sell
nowadays it's really not that odd they chose this easier route instead.
Hidyho!