Roman Holiday is getting the UHD treatment, and the write-up I read spends nearly all of its space on Peck, Hepburn and how well the thing still charms 70-odd years later. Which is fair, it does. It also says close to nothing about the disc, and for a catalogue release from 1953 the disc is the entire question.
Monochrome is a strange fit for the 4K HDR sales pitch. There is no wider colour gamut to sell you, so what is left is grayscale separation and grain. Done properly you get shadow detail that the old Blu-ray flattened into black, whites that hold texture instead of clipping, and film grain rendered as grain rather than as a fuzzy grey wash. Done badly, and this has happened plenty of times to catalogue titles, you get a scan that has been through noise reduction until faces look like wax and the highlights get pushed to prove HDR is doing something.
In my experience with black and white catalogue releases the improvement almost always comes from a fresh scan of good elements rather than from the HDR pass itself. If the same old master is being reused with a grade on top, the upgrade is marginal and you are buying the packaging. So the useful information would be which elements were scanned and when, and reviews that skip that in favour of describing the plot leave you guessing.
For those of you who buy classic black and white on UHD, what makes you pull the trigger? A named restoration and a scan year, or do you just take the gamble on titles you love?
Monochrome is a strange fit for the 4K HDR sales pitch. There is no wider colour gamut to sell you, so what is left is grayscale separation and grain. Done properly you get shadow detail that the old Blu-ray flattened into black, whites that hold texture instead of clipping, and film grain rendered as grain rather than as a fuzzy grey wash. Done badly, and this has happened plenty of times to catalogue titles, you get a scan that has been through noise reduction until faces look like wax and the highlights get pushed to prove HDR is doing something.
In my experience with black and white catalogue releases the improvement almost always comes from a fresh scan of good elements rather than from the HDR pass itself. If the same old master is being reused with a grade on top, the upgrade is marginal and you are buying the packaging. So the useful information would be which elements were scanned and when, and reviews that skip that in favour of describing the plot leave you guessing.
For those of you who buy classic black and white on UHD, what makes you pull the trigger? A named restoration and a scan year, or do you just take the gamble on titles you love?
