Region 4 Winners and Losers

    As mentioned above, I suspect that the R1 Superbit and R4 Superbit discs draw their video from the same (superb) high definition transfer. So the two Superbit discs offer equal quality video, you might think. Not quite so, to my eyes. The lower resolution of the NTSC system seems to tell against the R1, making the very mild aliasing a touch more noticeable. The effect is slight, true, but I'd rather have the slightly better rather than the slightly worse.

    The Region 1 disc has the standard Superbit soundtracks of 5.1 dts and 5.1 Dolby Digital, both English, so it's missing the 5.1 Dolby Digital French we get on the R4, but it does have English Dolby Digital 5.1 rather than 2.0 (surround encoded). I thought that was a serious limitation at first, but then I started to wonder: could I really imagine someone buying a Superbit disc without having dts support? Nah!

    The original Region 4 disc had a few extras:

• filmographies
• poster gallery
• MPEG 2.0 soundtracks in English, French, and Spanish

    It had Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks in English and French (no dts).

    At the time, the original R4 disc was considered state-of-the-art. Now, we notice little things like the dot-crawl on the opening credits, the touches of edge-enhancement, the lower levels of shadow detail, and the somewhat greater levels of aliasing. The original R4 is not an awful disc (I've seen lots worse...), but both Superbits are considerably better.

    If you have the R1 Superbit disc I can't recommend lashing out for this one (unless you really feel the need...), but if you don't have the R1 Superbit, then this one makes a wonderful demo disc for that huge new display you just bought...