Zatoichi in HD?

[silentspyder]

I'm not even sure if I should ask considering I have nothing HD but does anyone know if the old Zatoichi movies (the ones with Shintaro Katsu)are available in HD? I've searched but I haven't found anything. I know they've been done in HD because I used to watch them on the now dead, Kung Fu HD Channel from Voom at work. I was surprised at how well these old movies from the 50's and 60's looked and I would like to get them whenever I do buy an HD tv and player.

[smoke_me_a_kipper]

Check the Criterion Collection website, they put out the DVDs.

But IMHO your in for a wait.

[tokenuser]

I'm not even sure if I should ask considering I have nothing HD but does anyone know if the old Zatoichi movies (the ones with Shintaro Katsu)are available in HD? I've searched but I haven't found anything. I know they've been done in HD because I used to watch them on the now dead, Kung Fu HD Channel from Voom at work. I was surprised at how well these old movies from the 50's and 60's looked and I would like to get them whenever I do buy an HD tv and player.Not all content on those channels was "HD". Much of it was upscaled/converted 16:9 content.

You'd be surprised at just how good a lot of old movies (from DVD - VHS not so hot) look when they are upscaled for a HD TV. They tend to look better on a 720p set than a 1080i/p one though ... you can push upscaling too far.

[mic]

You'd be surprised at just how good a lot of old movies (from DVD - VHS not so hot) look when they are upscaled for a HD TV. They tend to look better on a 720p set than a 1080i/p one though ... you can push upscaling too far.

I don't know if you heard of the Back to the Future movie series transfer problems, but the VHS tapes were matted correctly, while the DVDs were all screwed up. It's my understanding that the LD transfers are/were considered to be the best transfers made of the Future movies. Grant it, it was awhile ago when this happened. So, which would you prefer, good upscaling (but badly matted) or limited/no upscaling (but see the movie as it was originally intended)?

[tokenuser]

I don't know if you heard of the Back to the Future movie series transfer problems, but the VHS tapes were matted correctly, while the DVDs were all screwed up. It's my understanding that the LD transfers are/were considered to be the best transfers made of the Future movies. Grant it, it was awhile ago when this happened. So, which would you prefer, good upscaling (but badly matted) or limited/no upscaling (but see the movie as it was originally intended)?I want the best I can get ... but this isn't about film transfer. There have been plenty of crappy transfers to both VHS and DVD.

Take the best you can find. You are always going to be limited by the quality of the media you are upscaling from.

An upscaling DVD player (I have a Samsung model that is amazing) does a great job of conversion for an HD TV, but it looked better on a 720p TV than our 1080i TV (60" highlights the limitations)

I don't have experience with an upscaling VHS deck - do they even exist?

[mic]

But see, that's kind of my point. Even if the "future" movies aren't a recent example, the VHS tapes had a better transfer than the DVDs, but the DVDs, which would have provide the better over all looking picture, also would have had the worse looking transfer. Obviously the "Future" movies weren't the last to suffer from this as recent Blu-ray discs have problems, too.

IIRC, one of the problems with Back to the Future (Part II) was that when Marty McFly was using his hovering skateboard the matting cut all but his feet in some scenes. The complaints about this and other problems were brought to Universal's attention many times, and with each region release the problems remained.

I would like to think I could overlook the poor transfer in exchange for the better looking picture, but seeing the entire frame of a movie, that was either accidently or intentionally cropped, does put a kink in the armor. Given the general quality of VHS tape, this would be an easy decision to forget the poor transfer in favor of the potential higher picture quality of DVD. But, given that engineers took more care to transfer to LD and in some cases LD are/were often considered the choice for both quality and transfer, the choice gets a little tougher. And, there are still movies only available on LD and VHS that never made it to DVD, and are unlikely that they will make it to Blu-ray.

BTW, I don't have any LD in my collection, or care that much for the "Future" movies, so I don't really have a horse in this race. I'm just saying that sometimes picture quality isn't everything. Take for another example SD getting stretched to fit 16:9 TVs. If it aired 4:3, leave it 4:3. Same with Letterbox movies getting the 4:3 Pan and Scan treatment. I know, I know, this is often done for the uneducated TV viewer. Same with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg messing with E.T. and Star Wars, and other movies, to make them more "modern". I wish they would stop doing that.

Sorry for the bit-o-rant. :)

Let me see, oh yeah, I know Costco sells or use to sell a VHS deck with HDMI outputs, but who knows what else it does. My Samsung 950 LCD TV does a better job at upscaling than my Denon 3808 AVR, so I let the 950 handle the picture size and the receiver handle the HDMI switching.

[silentspyder]

Perhaps it was upscaled. It is a 720p set that we have at work (where I used to watch) and I've never seen enough of upscaled dvd to compare.