DVD details for for
The Big Lebowski (1998)

Michel Hafner (18 April 1999):
This DVD has got rave reviews on the net and elsewhere. Deservedly? Let's see. The film master is pretty clean but not better than many others of current films, and it's rather grainy in many parts. Contrast and color are good, but nothing special either. So is sharpness. We have definitely seen sharper DVDs. There is little aliasing and ringing artifacts about contours are relatively mild, but definitely there. Real bad compression artifacts are not present, either. So it looks like this is a decent DVD but nothing real special, certainly not reference quality material. I guess it looks fine on small TV screens. But what when it's put under the merciless loupe of large high quality TV sets or high end wall size projection systems? Unfortunately under these circumstances this DVD's various problems become rather obvious.
Probably the most serious is digital noise removal gone too far. I first thought it was a compression problem, but it's not. Digital noise reduction averages pixel values of succeeding frames. As long as there is no motion from frame to frame this works beautifully, but if there is motion, pixels, that do not belong to the same image part, are averaged. Artifacts are inevitable unless you recognize the motion and do not average in these areas. This has not been done properly for this DVD. As a result there are many instances where you see fine image detail abruptly disappear as textures start moving, and reappear as they stop again. A good example for this is Jeff Bridge's grey jacket at chapter 5:0:25 and following. Its detailed texture is disappearing and reappearing way beyond what normal motion blur does. Once you are familiar with these artefacts it's hard to overlook them and they become rather annoying. Problems exist in most scenes and some are pretty distracting. In addition, the low bit rate results in some compression problems. Close inspection reveals I frame pulsing, sometimes floating image parts and a noisy appearance of pictures with fine detail (such as the shelves at the supermarket at chapter 1: 2:00). Add to that the often grainy images, despite noise reduction, and a tube face problem (see the finger print like pattern in the sky at chapter 1: 1:41) and you get a picture which leaves a lot to be desired.
This is a great movie but not a great DVD. Pity. Let's hope for a better version sometime in the futute, based on a better master with less grain and a decent bit rate, so the above mentioned problems can be avoided.