feihong wrote:I got Power last week and watched it. It looks much better than the DVDs did, so that's cool. But it's hard for me to gauge the degree of noise reduction on the disc. The lower contrast scenes, like the initial scene in the train and the scene where Sangwon visits the professor at his apartment and leaves his umbrella, look fairly soft. In many of the outdoor scenes I thought I could see a fine grain structure. But then, I saw The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well in 35mm and I thought it looked soft there.
The film sounded really good, and the subtitles read well. The whole film seemed to move faster than I remembered it moving. And the movie was as great as I remember it being. The disc seems to me a good investment.
My feeling is that the covers of all these redone discs are not as good as the they were on any of the former packages. I think Turning Gate being done all in black is a huge step down from the very vibrant and lively promotional art they used for the dvd box. And the original Spectrum DVD of Kangwon had a great high-contrast black-and-white image of the Sangwon and Jisook embracing that carried all the somber weight of the film and expressed it in a very dynamic way. The new blu-ray covers look to me like they're done without much skill or sophistication, and they come off as very impersonal.
I noticed some softness in the picture on some of the outdoor scenes, but I think it is how the film was shot. One scene in particular was in the woods where Jisook was burying the fish; the scene seemed soft but the plants in the foreground were very sharp.
One thing I noticed is that in the director's trailer, Jisook's M&M shirt was blue on the scene where she is in the bus. Is the color off? During the film, the shirt appeared much darker.
Otherwise, I was very happy with the picture and sound quality. The subtitles did have a few spelling errors, but nothing you couldn't figure out ("Then" when the context clearly means "Them"). I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys the film and can't imagine it looking any better.