Poll: Which Blu-ray studio is your favorite?
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 11th 2008 12:00PM
posted Oct 11th 2008 12:00PM
posted Oct 11th 2008 12:00PM
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I don't really pay attention to the studio -- it certainly never factors into my decision to buy a disc. If forced to chose, I would say New Line (technically Warner Bros.), because they released the fantastic Dark City BD.
Interesting poll. it is important because often a film made by one studio over another will have better picture, audio, extras and pricing.
I would also like to see a poll for consumers least favorite studios. Would be helpful for sending messages to some of them
I wanna know why people are saying Sony. I picked Warner because of the movies they have and are going to have, and their prices are the cheapest, last I checked Sony still rips you off and Disney is doing well, but still they need to start putting out their Pixar movies in Blu.
Most people are saying Sony for the same reason that Sound & Vision picked Sony. While Warner Bros. might arguably have a better catalog of movies (and I would agree with that), they've been hit and miss with their Blu-Ray releases. Most of Sony's BD titles have very high bitrates, and have PCM and/or Loseless audio tracks. Warner Bros. for the most part released titles for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and encoded the movies to maximum space that HD-DVD permitted, which means a lower video bitrate, and often only Dolby Digital tracks, rather than TrueHD or DTS HD Master. Batman Begins, which came out on HD-DVD about a year earlier than the Blu-Ray, had the same video encode for both, even though they had a year and an extra 10 or 20 gigs for the Blu-Ray.
And then there are titles like Speed Racer, which was a very recent Blu-Ray only release, and only had a Dolby Digital track.
Because they haven't bothered to watch any Universal titles yet.
Lessons learned during HD DVD have made for outstanding Blu-Ray releases.
Menu UI that works on every title
DTS-MA for everything
What's not to like?
Digital Playground is my favorite! ;-)
I honestly couldn't answer this without doing some research. The reason is simple: I watch movies and not studios. Doh!
who cares.
Why aren't more people choosing LionsGate? This is the studio trying to deliver 7.1 on each release. Nobody else is doing this.
Disney by a mile. Anyone who picks Sony is high. Seriously. Fifth Element? Sure they made right by replacing discs for early adopters - but that POS should have never been released. Double dip Casino Royale? Loads of shoddy MPEG2 garbage. Sony was really hit and miss early on. Disney has been consistently amazing. Lossless, great transfers and great movies.
I don't have a favorite but,I got burned ONCE with the release of Enter The Dragon on blu-ray. I already had it on regular dvd and found out that the studio just used the existing master to release it to blu-ray! Warner Bros.should have gone in and remastered it for High Definition and cleaned up the Video at least!
I'm not picking on Warner Bros.because ALL of the Studios are Guilty of this! I have at least 100 regular dvd's that I want to replace with blu-ray, but if the video and audio have not gone through a remastering process, I'll just keep up-converting them! I'd like to thank those who report movie reviews honestly, because if it wasn't for them, I'd be wasting my money and we all can't be doing that this day-n-age!
WB. Simply due to their region coding policy. The same reason I continue to boycott FOX.
My favorite studio is kind of a tie between Disney/BVHE and Sony (I ended up voting for Disney though because the last release I bought from them, Sleeping Beauty, showcased something so simple yet so important in BD Live releases: a progress bar! Every other BD Live title I've seen has lacked this important user interface element for whatever reason, and you're left wondering if you're actually downloading something or if the connection was reset/dropped.
The studio I'd like to call attention to as having dropped the ball is Warner. This studio continues to use repurposed/recycled encodes of their HD DVD films for major blockbusters on their BD releases (see Constantine and the Matrix collection). Hopefully new releases like The Dark Knight will buck this trend of less than stellar encodes, but I'm not holding my breath (they are, afterall, still using VC-1, which leads me to believe they're using the same settings they used back when they supported HD DVD).
Last but not least, hopefully all the studios can avoid excessive DNR on their releases. I know Universal has been playing around with this on some of their catalog releases (they re-encoded The Mummy films for Blu-ray, but added DNR which killed some of the detail available on the HD DVD releases). I know DNR gives the appearance of a slicker/cleaner presentation because it hides/removes film grain, but that film grain is often where the detail/texture of a picture is. Removing it actually makes the film less detailed.
Anyways, here's hoping 2009 and beyond makes this a competition of quality rather than quantity.
With the economy where it's at now and the future looking grimmer, I think some of the lower scoring movie studios will get bought up from the likes of Sony,Disney,Paramount/Dreamworks,Warner Bros./New Line Cinema and Universal. My reasoning is that some of the higher graded studios have other means of generating revenue (outside of theatre sales) that can be allocated to restoration or mastering of their films. Sony has it's hands in the consumer electronics department and Disney's into Amusement Parks. Fox owns a television station. It must be very expensive (and painstaking) to master or restore films to hi-def quality? I might be onto something, I just don't see how MGM,the Weinstein Company and Lionsgate can keep up! Wait, If I was in the market to buy up one of the lower scoring studios it would be Lionsgate.. because at least they are making just about every release they have in 7.1 audio!
I suppose I'm not discerning enough to have an opinion here.
I picked Warner because their movies are better priced and have the least amount of BS to wade through before the movie. Disney would be last for those reasons.
Maybe a "least favorite" poll?