DVD details for
Dinosaur (2000) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (25 February 2001):
This collector's edition of Dinosaur (2000) by Disney is one of the best looking DVDs released so far.
The master used is a downsampled version of the digital master created for digital projection of the film with the TI system in a few selected cinemas. It is extremely clean and image steadiness is excellent. This is another direct digital DVD although parts of the film were shot on film and not digitally created from scratch.
Images are sharp throughout, but as was evident in cinemas already the live action backgrounds are not quite as sharp as the CGI parts.
Color and contrast rendition are identical to the master elements upto DVD's resolution. No complaints whatsoever.
The noise and grain level is very low. The live action parts show a bit of grain, the CGI is noisefree except for the unavoidable noise caused by MPEG compression which is minimal.
As far as video artifacts are concerned this DVD is upper league as well. There is a bit of aliasing at times in dinosaur textures and sometimes a bit of ringing, possibly related to some edge enhancement.
Compression is fine. But I think it's a bit sad that with source material this good Disney does not go the full circle and minimise quality loss due to compression by encoding the film with a maximum bit rate from start to finish. Instead they put supplements on the disc despite the fact that there is a second disc anyway with tons of supplements.
The first edition of this disc set has mastering bugs that create problems with many players on the market. It made the Sony 7700 I used freeze twice and lose the audio stream. It crashed my laptop player and laptop as well. A fixed edition will become available soon. And while they are fixing things, they better have a look at the main menu too. This main menu is quite shocking compared to the quality of the rest of the material. Something went terribly wrong since the compression is horrible (I-frame pulsing as on a trash DVD) and the text flickers like it came from a composite master. Yuck!
This dual DVD, ignoring the mastering bugs, is one of the best looking DVDs released so far. All image quality aspects are of reference quality or close. Watching it on good equipment you are often tempted to think that you are seeing HDTV material. Close-ups of the CGI creatures reveal outstanding detail. The DVD offers very film like images throughout and will look excellent on any kind of properly set up display. Highly recommended. The image quality of the supplements is uneven but mostly good, at times as good as the feature itself.