I noticed this Rina Nagai title, which was released on DVD but not Blu-Ray, has “Rent HD” and “Buy HD” options on Amazon Prime. But is it true HD or just an upscale? I’ve read other sites do upscales of idol movies shot in standard definition.
I noticed this Rina Nagai title, which was released on DVD but not Blu-Ray, has “Rent HD” and “Buy HD” options on Amazon Prime. But is it true HD or just an upscale? I’ve read other sites do upscales of idol movies shot in standard definition.
Yes, some sites might in fact sell bloated upscale versions of original SD footage. I highly doubt that Amazon does. Then again the issue might not be with Amazon at all but the studio. There are some studios that do not sell BDs. However they do shoot the source in 1080HD. Another example was one just a few months ago by Rui Kiriyama. Only sold on physical media as DVD but for sale as HD on a few sites. Having purchased both I can verify that the HD is not a bloated upscale version. Although the compression on the shitty DRM wmv file (I feel gross just saying that) is OK... not as good as my 1080 encodes but better than a tiny SD version. The audio quality on thedvdv is much better too. Maybe one day I’ll try a remux of the DVD audio & HD video to make a DRM free HD version?
Really the costs of producing physical BDs is too high for many studios to justify them. So they just sell the lowest common denominator DVD and HD as download only.