Firefly

Now this is what I call a demo disc. Serenity on HD-DVD displays all the potential for a film to digital transfer on a top of the line HDTV. Again, I’m only using a 720p 52” JVC and quite simply, this is how you want Star Wars to look.

Shots of outer space show the deep black with the exquisitely detailed ships, be they models or CGI concoctions, set against them. Especially for the scene in Reever space, the blood caked on the ship is like a morbid rainbow of red.

Interior and nighttime scenes manage to portray the full range of colors. Such scenes have been the most noticeable flaw in DVD progressive scans through HDMI outputs, often getting grainier or at least muddying the colors. Here, clothing and props maintain their stark colors against the often cold, industrial sets of Serenity.

Outdoors on the frontier planets, it’s like you’re looking at living oil paintings. Perhaps due to some of the CGI enhancement, they’re still the most epic, colorful vistas short of Discovery Channel.

The scene selection format from Universal seemed to give the Toshiba player a bit more trouble than the Warner Brothers titles. It was taking forever to scroll down the scenes so I just played and scanned on the fly. Technological hiccups that are sure to be worked out as the format develops.