Blu Ray vs DVD: Older Movies

Aside from new releases, does blu ray make a big difference in picture and sound quality for older movies (1930-1980s)? If so, how drastic?

Some are pointless upgrades such as Bugsy Malone but The Shining looks quite unbelievable on Blu-ray.

It all depends. You should do some research: this site has a pretty decent reviews section for Blu-Rays

http://www.highdefdigest.com/

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Night of the Werewolf looks good for being that old

Uh, uhlot.

I compared my Taxi Driver DVD to my copy on blu ray, it's a world of difference.

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I'm not a big fan of a few releases I've seen where they "clean up" the film grain for some of the older films.

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As people say, it depends. The quality varies just as much as it does with more recent releases. If the print used is of good standard and the director of the film isn't William Friedkin (I won't forgive you for The French Connection's abomination even though The Exorcist's transfer is so good, Bill ) then the HD quality will usually follow.

Like filmgirlinterrupted, I use Highdefdigest when weighing up whether to go for a blu ray that I already own on DVD as I find their reviewers pretty solid.

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Of course blu ray is better if it's, as Tacitus pointed out, transfered well to blu ray and the print is in good condition. Metropolis, from the 20s, looks stunning on blu ray compared to dvd.

It doesn't matter how old the film is, if it's a good condition print(35mm mostly) and not done by some company who doesn't really care, blu ray will be better than the dvd everytime...

Thanks for the answers everyone. Got the information I needed.

Yeah, depends on the film and studio and DVD makers and whatever. I use that hidef review site, too. But I only own about 5 Blu Rays. I can imagine 2001 looking great on HD.

It was one of my first purchases. And it looks great.

As far as I know, they diddled with it a bit but the original print was of such great quality it would have looked good anyway.


EDIT - One thing from the opening post which needs to be addressed is sound quality.

That one's a bit trickier because fewer people have a HD sound system to go with their HD television - The TrueHD and DTS-HD graphics on the sleeve won't mean anything unless you've got a HD receiver and you'll be getting whatever DD or DTS 5.1 track that they have to implant in the HD one in order to cater for all systems.

I think it's fair to say that, before I got a HD receiver, the sound was what disappointed me most from Blu Ray but when I got my Onkyo I soon discovered what all the fuss was about. There are some HD soundtracks which don't seem to work too well (and the occasional idiotic decision to give a foreign language film's dub track the HD treatment and leave the native one SD) and often they're the ones which try to surround-ify an old film's 2.0 track.

Things often end up sounding a bit contrived (but this is no different to DVDs taking the same approach) but usually there is an option to listen to the original stereo track.

In short, you might need to explore the different tracks on offer to get the best sound.