DVD details for
Gilda (1946) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (15 October 2001):
Gilda (1946) is a classic film. Does the Columbia-Tristar DVD do it justice?
The film master used is a restored film element that is indeed in very good shape for a film that will soon be 60 years old. It's pretty clean and quite steady.
Contrast rendition is excellent.
Images are almost always sharp and the noise and grain level is quite low and never distracting.
So far it's close to optimal. Compression is for the most part solid. Since it's a dual layer disc the average bit rate is rather high. What puzzles me though is the fact that quite unnecessarily these cocky Sony compressionists like to show off with their oh so efficient encoder and drop the bit rate below 3 Mbit/s if they think it's safe. Well, keep the bit rate up, guys, even if there's not much motion because it's not safe. There are compression artifacts visible at times and when I checked the bit rate was ridiculously low at these moments. That's idiotic since there are enough bits available to compress everything with a high bit rate.
Finally, there are also video artifacts visible. A bit of edge enhancement at times and quite often slight noise reduction artifacts that mess somewhat with textures.
This DVD looks very good and will surely please on any kind of display. Under revealing viewing conditions minor artifacts are evident. Recommended.