4K Blu-ray

Eureka Blu-ray's stereo sounds better than the Sony 4K Blu-ray stereo

Twilight Time has an isolated score

(small caveat: the OG 2.0 track has not been cleaned up)

See Chris's review

Their 4K Blu-ray has minor additional filtering.

Ignite and Second Sight UHDs have differing extras

> Kino Lorber US 4K Blu-ray, see caps

Arrow has done additional cleanup work removing nearly all the damage in the transfer. They have massaged the color timing and HDR to try and improve what they could. The Capelight may have better encoding but it does not have these improvements. The Arrow encoding is solid and in motion there are no issues whatsoever. The Kino Lorber release has the damage and other issues plus frequent noise due to the lesser encoding.

Some scenes in the Arrow transfer are better, some are better in the Capelight.

(Arrow is a port of the LaserDisc track, see spectrograms) This track has the best fidelity of any release but does have some channel bleeding baked in. The 2017 2.0 on the Arrow and Shout! Factory Blu-rays was the Dolby Stereo original mix without channel bleeding but that had heavy noise reduction resulting in a very flat and underwhelming presentation. The surround winds up being lessened as well due to the processing. It's a tough choice between the two but the Image LaserDisc audio wins out because it hasn't been messed with and the impact is so unrestrained that no other version hits in the same way.

Capelight and old Arrow Blu-ray included the original stereo mix, but with excessive noise reduction rendering it much less detailed. Kino Lorber only included a painfully defective 2.0 track sourced from somewhere with limited fidelity, volume spikes and screechy high end which frequently ruins the music. The 5.1 remix on most modern release is a processed version that does not sound as good as it once did.

The best and most accurate of the 5.1 mixes is the original version from the 2003 Special Edition DVD in lossy AC3 form.

The best source for the commentaries are from the 2003 Special Edition DVD.

> 2023 Knockout Collection 4K Blu-ray

2023 disc has a brief moment where the aspect ratio changes from 1.85:1 to 1.78:1, 2024 release fixed the error

Both cuts of the movie are on the same disc and don’t appear to be seamlessly branched. 

The Steelbook and UK standard edition are the same disc as the 2023 knockout collection.

> Paramount 4K Blu-ray

Shout! Factory 4K Blu-ray is poor, Paramount Blu-ray is better, R1 DVD is best

Good 4K Blu-ray upgrades of Ritrovata's flawed restorations

Excellent new transfer. Except for periodic blocking in highlights, which isn’t too obvious in motion, this is a strong disc. I’d suggest blue as there’s only Atmos sound and the most recent Blu-ray from 2013 was also from a new master and isn’t too bad.

Atmos mix is very bad with many new sound effects added. The old 5.1 is probably derived from the 6-track, with surrounds minimally upmixed. DVD has the 6-track as 4.1, but with more muffled EQ.

US GKIDS/Australia Umbrella 4K Blu-ray authored by FiM with identical encodes

UHD vs BD comparisons

Second Sight 4K Blu-ray (review)

Paramount 4K Blu-ray caps show a very disappointing encode / upgrade