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Author Topic: Almost transparent Blu-Ray disc Claude S. Ayakawa Film God Posts: 2738 From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-21-2009 01:19 PM                        I bought the Blu-Ray version of GODS & GENERALS because I am a American Civil War fan from Wal Mart yesterday and opened the package after I bought it and was shocked to see the disc was almost transparent. Because I never saw a disc looking like this before, I felt I might have bought a defective copy. To my surprise, the FBI warning, menu and credits looked normal when I played the disc but the picture image looked liked a color transparency film that was at least a stop over exposed making everything look washed out. I also have GODS & GENERAL on standard DVD and the picture and sound are gorgeous and I knew I bought a defective Blu-Ray copy and will return it today. Has anyone had a problem with a BD like mine? -Claude  |  IP: Logged Mark J. Marshall Film God Posts: 3188 From: New Castle, DE, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-21-2009 03:18 PM                    So wait... the disk was transparent... and then the image on the screen seemed sort of transparent too?? That's an odd coincidence if I read that right.  |  IP: Logged Claude S. Ayakawa Film God Posts: 2738 From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-21-2009 08:01 PM                        Mark, I did not say the disc and the picture quality was transparent. If you you read by post carefully, I said the disc almost looked transparent because I was almost able to see through it and I did not say the picture was also transparent. I said it was washed out and looked like an overexposed color transparency film. -Claude  |  IP: Logged Mark J. Marshall Film God Posts: 3188 From: New Castle, DE, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-21-2009 08:14 PM                     |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 06-21-2009 08:26 PM                        Here's what Claude is talking about: You can see the lampshade's fabric pattern right through lettering on the disc, which is where there's no silkscreening. Light still passes through the rest of the label too. I've rented & played all six Season 1 and Season 2 Blu-ray discs of "Dexter". All the discs look like this and all played back flawlessly. I've seen a few other rental discs like this, no problems with any of them so far. "Dexter" is highly entertaining in case anyone asks, and looks great on BD.  |  IP: Logged Claude S. Ayakawa Film God Posts: 2738 From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-21-2009 09:32 PM                        Dave, After a period of time, I had a whole bunch of laserdiscs go bad on me and turned completely transparent. They were all pressed by 3M and the company was famous for it's discs developing laser rot. I still have a few 3M laserdiscs that were good when I last played them more than ten years ago but with the introduction of DVDs and Blu-Rays, I no longer watch laserdiscs anymore. I am pretty a lot of my laserdiscs are no longer any good after rotting. With the exception of a few early DVDs from Universal that would not pLay anymore, I had no problem with them so far. -Claude  |  IP: Logged Mike Heenan Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1896 From: Scottsdale, AZ, USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 06-21-2009 09:48 PM                     Mark.... lol.  |  IP: Logged Jarret Chessell Master Film Handler Posts: 288 From: London, Ontario, Canada Registered: Jan 2009 posted 06-22-2009 12:51 AM                     I think it's also worth mentioning... I've been a little disappointed with some of the transfers to blu-ray, I know others would agree. Maybe the disc is suppose to look like that, maybe not. I wouldn't be surprised if they just did a half ass job of making the blu-ray, hoping that selling the movie in a blue case would improve sales. I'm curious to know if your replacement looks the same.  |  IP: Logged Julio Roberto Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 938 From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain Registered: Oct 2008 posted 06-22-2009 03:42 AM                    Claude: I guess you still haven't grasped the way DVD and Blu-ray work. It would be a long and boring technical explanation, but, unlike LaserDiscs which were, in effect, a hybrid form of analog video (let's not get into subtle details), DVD's and Blu-ray's are not only digital, but encrypted and compressed. In a few words this means: it's totally, completely, absolutely, mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for a blu-ray or DVD disc to produce anywhere near a coherent image that is not EXACTLY what the person that made the disc intended to produce, under any circunstances. A "replication fault" could only yield to a movie with gross and obvious faults of the type of: A) Not playing at all B)Freezing the hell out of the picture C) Big chunks of incoherent blocks of stuff showing up. But it's TOTALLY impossible to produce a more-or-less normal looking picture with some "subtle" faults, say off-colors or weird gamma. If it displays that way, the only MATHEMATICAL possibilities are: that's the way it should be (the way the manufacturer ok'ed the master) or the playback equipment is faulty/misscalibrated. So every single copy of the blu-ray that you buy (from the same edition, of course) would look exactly the same. The DVD version that you have has been mastered separately, perhaps even from a different transfer, so you can not use it for comparison except to figure that whoever mastered the DVD either had access to better source material or did a better job than the (idiot) who transfered/mastered the blu-ray. But there CAN'T be DVD or blu-ray discs with "subtle defects" from one copy to another. Simplifying: all DVD's look the same, and all BD discs look 100.00% the same NECESSARILY or, if defective, they "don't play at all or give huge obvious problems", but they can't ever give somewhat normal looking images with "imperfections". And yes, the blu-ray discs can be made to look quite transparent and still read perfectly. In this case, if you are not satisfied with the picture from that edition, all the replacement discs you get would produce the exact same result. Unless the manufacturer acknowledge the did a job and pressed a NEW DIFFERENT EDITION re-mastered (or re-transferred) to exchange them with. But it's not (can't possibly be) a fault with your "one-off" disc. ALL the discs from that edition of the movie will be EXACTLY the same by mathematical need. Welcome to the wonderful world of digital. Think of digital encryption like a safety box with a pristine (or shitty, that's up to the owner) photograph inside. You must read perfectly the combination to open safe's lock or, if you screw up even the slightliest number, the combination won't open the safe at all. If the safe opens, the picture inside will be exaclty the picture the owner placed there. If a single one of the numbers is wrong, the safe doesn't open at all and you get no picture wathsoever. You can't get a "bad picture" or "partially defective picture" because you read one of the numbers of the combination wrong. The safe won't open at all in that case and you'll get no picture whatsoever. That's a way you could see digital encryption. And (virtually) all DVD and Blu-ray movies are digitally encrypted, so they must decrypt to 100.00% the exact "combination" or they can't be "opened" at all. And then comes compression, yet another mathematical transformation the requires every single number to be 100% correct or the results won't make sense ... With these digital formats you always get: 100% the data you put in there or ... an obviously very corrupt result. No in-between.  |  IP: Logged Chris Slycord Film God Posts: 2986 From: 퍼항시, 경상푹도, South Korea Registered: Mar 2007 posted 06-22-2009 09:10 AM                     quote: Claude S. Ayakawa I also have GODS & GENERAL on standard DVD and the picture and sound are gorgeous and I knew I bought a defective Blu-Ray copy and will return it today Why do you assume both copies use the same transfer, at the same quality?  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-22-2009 09:36 AM                     Seeing through a disk has more to do with the label then anything else. The alumnium is vapor deposited if I remember correctly so it is molecular thin... like a partial mirror. On another note I;m amazed that Wal-Mart has anything worth buying. The Wal-Mart here has a pathetic selection of BRDs. I don't even bother to look there any more. Mark  |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 06-22-2009 10:46 AM                        Claude is saying the DVD looks great and the BD not so much. Not necessarily that they're from the same transfer. It's not unreasonable to expect the BD quality to exceed anything that was done previously (in fact it damn well better) but in this case Claude thinks the BD is inferior. So maybe the BD transfer is in fact really bad. I dunno. As Julio said though, it's unlikely the BD disc is one-off defective, more likely a bad transfer.  |  IP: Logged Chris Slycord Film God Posts: 2986 From: 퍼항시, 경상푹도, South Korea Registered: Mar 2007 posted 06-22-2009 11:00 AM                     quote: David Stambaugh As Julio said though, it's unlikely the BD disc is one-off defective, more likely a bad transfer. Or as he said as well, it could be bad settings on the blu-ray player.  |  IP: Logged Claude S. Ayakawa Film God Posts: 2738 From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-22-2009 02:59 PM                        It seem Mark Gulbrandsen with his GRAND TORINO BD and me with my GODS & GENERALs disc seem to be having a similar problem. His disc had dark images while mine was washed out. It is very interesting to note that both of the discs were from Warner Brothers Home Video. I took my 'bad' disc beck to the store and exchanged it for another copy but before taking the new copy home I had the store check it and it too had washed out images. I also decided not to accept this copy and asked for a refund which was at first was refused because store policy dictates that I can only exchange a bad disc with another copy of the same title. Since I was not willing to accept the only two copies they had in stock that were unacceptable, they tried to get copies from other Walmart stores in the Honolulu district and there were none. They then tried me to contact Warner Brothers and get them to do a direct exchang with me but I refused telling them that as a consumer, it is not my responsibility to get involved between a vendor and supplier when I am not pleased with a product. I guess my argument made sense because they decided to give me a refund. Mark, Walmart is not as bad as you make them up to be. I got some terrific bargains from them including the BD special edition of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE CLOSE KIND for $29.95. both THE LAST SAMURAI and THE DIRTY DOZEN for $15.00 and so many others. They also do price match so I can always pick up mainstream new releases that are on sale at Best Buy and Target and buy them there at the same price as the other stores. The only thing about Walmart that had upset me was the incident that occurred last night. -Claude  |  IP: Logged Julio Roberto Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 938 From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain Registered: Oct 2008 posted 06-22-2009 03:06 PM                    quote: Claude S. Ayakawa It seem Mark Gulbrandsen with his GRAND TORINO BD Claude: Remember that Mark's problem with Torino wasn't a one-off disc. He finally figured out his blu-ray player wasn't set up properly, after which he started to get an acceptable picture. And ALL Torino movies were a little "dark" anyway (but not as much as he was experiencing due to having the wrong settings). Again, whether you "believe it" or not, it's an undeniable fact that there can't be a "slightly defective" blu-ray (or DVD) disc in the sense of one that would produce "slightly bad images" compared to others (of the same edition). No matter how many copies you try, they will all be the exact same (or totally/obviously corrupt, if the disc is indeed bad). So they are not defective. It's just the way the issuer authorized the transfer to look like. Of course, you are entitled to not liking it. But it's not defective per se and all replacement discs would look the exact same.  |  IP: Logged

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