PlayStationPepe
New member
Someone on Home Theater Forum put the collector's dilemma better than I've managed to. He wants pre-2015 Blu-rays of things like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Rain Man, The English Patient, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Fugitive, but keeps not buying them in case a 4K edition turns up, and has been in that holding pattern for years.
My own rule has hardened over time. If a title is a catalogue priority for a studio that still runs an active 4K restoration programme, waiting is reasonable, because those titles do eventually cycle round. If the rights are tangled, or the film sits in that awkward middle tier that isn't a franchise and isn't a critical darling, waiting is just a way of not watching a film you want to watch. The number of announced-then-quietly-shelved catalogue restorations should tell you how firm those plans really are.
The other half of it is that the old disc isn't always the lesser one. Some pre-2015 transfers came from good scans and hold up fine, and some later reissues arrive scrubbed with noise reduction and sharpened past what the negative ever looked like. Newer is not automatically better, especially for anything shot on film in the late nineties. Before you buy, it's also worth checking whether a 4K already exists in another region, because plenty of catalogue titles get an overseas edition years before a domestic one.
At current used Blu-ray prices, the maths mostly favours buying now and re-buying later if a genuinely better version shows up. What's the longest anyone here has waited for an upgrade that eventually arrived?
My own rule has hardened over time. If a title is a catalogue priority for a studio that still runs an active 4K restoration programme, waiting is reasonable, because those titles do eventually cycle round. If the rights are tangled, or the film sits in that awkward middle tier that isn't a franchise and isn't a critical darling, waiting is just a way of not watching a film you want to watch. The number of announced-then-quietly-shelved catalogue restorations should tell you how firm those plans really are.
The other half of it is that the old disc isn't always the lesser one. Some pre-2015 transfers came from good scans and hold up fine, and some later reissues arrive scrubbed with noise reduction and sharpened past what the negative ever looked like. Newer is not automatically better, especially for anything shot on film in the late nineties. Before you buy, it's also worth checking whether a 4K already exists in another region, because plenty of catalogue titles get an overseas edition years before a domestic one.
At current used Blu-ray prices, the maths mostly favours buying now and re-buying later if a genuinely better version shows up. What's the longest anyone here has waited for an upgrade that eventually arrived?
