Grace's
Member
Robert Harris has put up one of his short verdicts on the 1959 Ben-Hur in 4K, and it is about as clean a scorecard as that format produces. Image in Dolby Vision gets a 10 on both his forensic and his non-scientific marks, audio in Dolby Atmos gets a 10, it makes use of 4K and works well there at a 10, upgrade from Blu-ray is a yes, worth your attention is a yes, and there is a slipcover. He also specifically notes it plays nicely with projectors, which is not a line he throws around.
That last point is doing more work than it looks. Ben-Hur was shot in 65mm and lands at roughly 2.76:1, which is wider than almost anything else you own. On a 16:9 screen you are giving up a big chunk of panel to black bars and the actual image ends up smaller than the scope films you already complain about. On a 2.35:1 scope screen it still does not fill the width, so anyone with lens memory or an anamorphic setup has a real decision to make about which preset to build for it.
The Atmos track is the part I am more suspicious of, not because a 10 is wrong but because a 1959 six-track magnetic mix remade for objects can go two ways. Done with restraint you get the chariot race with actual space around it. Done with enthusiasm you get sound effects wandering the ceiling in a film that never had them.
For anyone who has run this on a projector already: did you build a dedicated 2.76 preset for it, or just let the bars sit there?
That last point is doing more work than it looks. Ben-Hur was shot in 65mm and lands at roughly 2.76:1, which is wider than almost anything else you own. On a 16:9 screen you are giving up a big chunk of panel to black bars and the actual image ends up smaller than the scope films you already complain about. On a 2.35:1 scope screen it still does not fill the width, so anyone with lens memory or an anamorphic setup has a real decision to make about which preset to build for it.
The Atmos track is the part I am more suspicious of, not because a 10 is wrong but because a 1959 six-track magnetic mix remade for objects can go two ways. Done with restraint you get the chariot race with actual space around it. Done with enthusiasm you get sound effects wandering the ceiling in a film that never had them.
For anyone who has run this on a projector already: did you build a dedicated 2.76 preset for it, or just let the bars sit there?
