The problem I find is that with a grainy transfer (which in of itself is perfectly fine and inherrent of the film stock used when the film was made so should not removed or 'cleaned-up') it is often hard to take a capture that makes it look 'good' as the grain will obviously look very different in motion than 'static' on a frozen image.

Very true.

Hey, some of rest of us are also Doctor Who geeks! (Not as big as you lot though [emoji39]).

I know what you mean, I don't tend to judge the difference between the DVD and BD because obviously they're going to look different (unless it's an 'up-scale' from a old master) but I'm often curious to see the differences between BD releases - not to the extent of some, fair play to them, but more just out of curiosity that the same film can look so different between a European version and an American version.

In theory blu's should look identical...but they don't.

Identical to each other or to the DVDs that preceded them? If the former then yes they should, if the latter then I don't agree as the DVD may have had issues and the compression technology wasn't as good 15-20 years ago like it is today, modern DVDs look bloody good I have to say.

Comparing blu ray should be identical to each other you'd think.

Yes, I agree then, I think that's why people get so annoyed because quite often American releases are far superior than European ones.

I suppose this is one of those other reasons you're staying out of it for now :lol:

A lot of it depends on the master as a great deal of the older 'off the shelf' HD masters were scanned years ago using older equipment. Then you've got to take into account whether any additional work has been done like brightness/colour correction etc. or even any grain removal or DNR *shudder*. As long as you're using the exact same master and not doing any additional tinkering then the results should be the same.

However, encoding the disc can also produce differences as the amount of data and how compressed it is can effect the end result.

The thing with brightness puzzles me. Why do they need to brighten things? If the original print is dark then brightening it up makes it different to how it looked originally. It's just the same as George Lucas tinkering with Star Wars, but less devastating obviously.