Every time I have tried to win this argument with someone I reached for the wrong scene. Explosions, bright daylight, a big colourful set piece. Streaming handles all of that fine, because a codec has plenty to work with when the frame is loud and busy and the highlights are hiding everything.
What actually exposes compression is the opposite. Dark scenes with slow gradients. Smoke, fog, rain at night, a wall lit by a single practical, a face in shadow. That is where you see banding step across what should be a smooth falloff, and where fine film grain gets smeared into a moving mush because the encoder decided it was noise. Blade Runner 2049 in the rain, the night sequences in 1917, anything shot on film that has been properly scanned rather than filtered. Show someone a slow dark pan side by side and they see it immediately, no explanation needed.
The other half of the argument, and honestly the easier win, is sound. Lossless tracks against streamed audio is a difference people hear on their first try, especially anything with a wide dynamic range where the quiet passages get squashed.
The caveat worth being honest about: the disc does not automatically win. If the master is mediocre, a disc of it is a mediocre master at a higher bitrate. Plenty of catalogue titles look no better on disc than they do streamed, because the same tired scan feeds both.
What is your one scene that has never failed to land? Mine is a night exterior, and I have never once had to point at what to look for.
What actually exposes compression is the opposite. Dark scenes with slow gradients. Smoke, fog, rain at night, a wall lit by a single practical, a face in shadow. That is where you see banding step across what should be a smooth falloff, and where fine film grain gets smeared into a moving mush because the encoder decided it was noise. Blade Runner 2049 in the rain, the night sequences in 1917, anything shot on film that has been properly scanned rather than filtered. Show someone a slow dark pan side by side and they see it immediately, no explanation needed.
The other half of the argument, and honestly the easier win, is sound. Lossless tracks against streamed audio is a difference people hear on their first try, especially anything with a wide dynamic range where the quiet passages get squashed.
The caveat worth being honest about: the disc does not automatically win. If the master is mediocre, a disc of it is a mediocre master at a higher bitrate. Plenty of catalogue titles look no better on disc than they do streamed, because the same tired scan feeds both.
What is your one scene that has never failed to land? Mine is a night exterior, and I have never once had to point at what to look for.
