DVD details for
Contact (1997) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (12 September 1999):
This is one of the best early DVDs from Warner Brothers. It helped build the reputation of DVD as a high quality format and it was reviewed very positively by practically everybody in the DVD reviewing business. Deservedly so? I think the answer is still yes. But technology has moved on since. "Contact" is still a good looking DVD but can't quite keep up with the best DVDs now available.
The film master used is clean and image steadiness is good. So are color and contrast rendition which are accurate and pleasing throughout. Sharpness is mostly good too, but uneven. Some shots/scenes are surprisingly fuzzy and do not come close to what we expect these days from a top 16:9 enhanced transfer. An example is the scene in chapter 19 running from 3:10 to 6:41. It lacks sharpness and is also too grainy to be state of the art. It looks more like video than film. On the other hand we have scenes that do not have these problems and look still very good, such as most of the actual launch of the pod. Probably the worst scene is in chapter 8 (0:28-0:57) where we have fuzzy images that are grainy and have also over-enhanced edges. Fortunately there are hardly any overenhanced edges in most other scenes. Generally video artifacts are minimal. A scene with an aliasing/moiré problem starts at the beginning of chapter 25. The culprit are the Venetian blinds whose fine horizontal lines are not adequately resolved. In addition we have a vertical window bar flickering (in the window to the left of Jodie Foster) here. Not nice. The average bit rate is a tad under 5 MBit/s which allows the compression to be pretty good. I have seen no major glitches.
There are tons of interesting supplemental materials on this DVD, one of the first to be so generous in this regard. It's of pretty good quality despite the fact that it's often only half resolution material and is encoded with a low bit rate which leads to visible I-frame pulsing. Better here than in the actual feature though, since the bit budget is limited with a film this long and so many supplements. "Contact" was also one of the first DVDs to profit from the use of single side dual layer technology, another reason it was a critical success.
The overall verdict for this DVD is positive. Image quality is still quite impressive even for today's standards but not up there with the best of the best. The supplements though are first rate. This is a disc that will hardly disappoint on any kind of display system. Recommended.