There are many science-fiction film available on iTunes. Many of them in HD, and many of them not available on Blu-Ray yet.
I’ve had a look at some of them and assessed them purely from a video quality point of view, and summarized the results below.
| Title | Itunes HD Review |
|---|---|
| Conquest of Space, The | Good: 4/5. Age of the film certainly shows here especially in the optical effects. Some artifacts here and there. My copy had a horrible (and singular) mpeg giltch within the first ten seconds. Would be interested to know if it was just my copy. |
| D.A.R.Y.L. | Good: 4/5. Nearly a three. Fine grain in some scenes but I would have expected a little more. Picture quality is overall good, but a little artifacty in places. Clear improvement on the DVD, thus a 4. |
| Fair: 3/5. Solid grain throughout. A few compression artifacts and some banding effects that appear to be in the source material. Note that this is the cinema version, rather than the home-video version that has Thunder-road appearing in the classroom. Worth it if you are a fan. | |
| Mysterious Island | Great: 5/5. Solid grain, good color. Fantastic stop-motion special effects from Ray Harryhausen. Highly recommended. |
| Quintet | Fair: 3/5. Hard to know what this movie is supposed to look like. The movie itself can be filed under Zardoz, but the camera appears to have had a vignette filter glued to the front for the entire film. Some scenes are both extremely soft and artifacty, while others are crisp and clear. Can't see this coming out on Blu-ray any time soon. |
| Black Hole, The | Great: 5/5. Rich thick grain everywhere. Few artifacts. This is the full cinema version with overture on a black screen and the angel-flying-through-the-arches scene. Recommended. |
| Fury, The | Fair: 3.5/5. Grain in all the right places. But only 720p ? Also a bit artifacty. The Twilight Time Blu-ray is the one to get. |
| Ice Pirates | Good: 4/5. Solid grain throughout. Smoke and strobe lighting in some sequences causes a few artifacts. Solid. |
| Virus | Great: 5/5. Modern-ish feature so not much grain, but lots of fine detail and few artifacts. A good representation of a bad 'B' movie. |
| Attack of the 50 ft. Woman | Good: 4/5. Grain where you'd expect to see it, but not quite as sharp as you might like it in some places. |
| Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The | Good: 4/5. Good grain, but a little artifacty here and there in darker sequences, still a solid presentation. |
| Buckaroo Banzai | Great: 5/5. A fine transfer of a quirky cult movie. Well worth your money. |
| Fahrenheit 451 | Poor: 2/5: I''m not sure what's going on with the picture. A few shots look great, but then what looks like both color/contrast boosting, combined with aggressive DVNR appears. Overall the colors appear similar to the Universal DVD release. Not worth your time. |
| Incredible Shrinking Man, The | Fair: 3/5. A very grainy black and white movie, which appears to just be running out of bits. Image has digital artifacts that may either be due to the low-bitrate, or some kind of noise reduction. Probably better than the DVD, but otherwise disappointing. |
| It Terror From Beyond Space | Great: 5/5. Fine grain throughout, minimal artifacts. This forerunner to Alien looks a treat in 1080p. highly recommended. |
| Monkey Business | Good: 4/5. Nice fine grain throughout, but a little artifacty .Better than a DVD, but likely bested by a Blu-ray. |
| Revenge of the Creature | Good: 4/5. Solid presentation of this creature feature. Good grain, but occasional minor artifacts when things get a bit monster-y. Definite upgrade over the DVD. |
| Shaggy Dog, The | Great: 5/5. A really nice HD scan of a fine grained black and white feature. A Blu-ray would be hard pressed to look much better. Highly recommended. |
| When Worlds Collide | Good: 4/5. No mucking around here. A nice transfer of a reasonably clean copy of the film. Some color fringing, and the drop in quality on every fade is awesome. Some minor damage to the print/negative causes me to deduct 1 point, but otherwise great stuff. |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Fair: 3/5. Oddly inconsistent shot to shot. Some sequences appear to have had some kind of noise reduction applied, while others look good. This may be due to limitations of the source material, which appears to be the same as the recent DVD. |
| Ravagers | Great: 5/5. Fine grain throughout - minimal artifacting. Highly recommended. |
| Pi | Great: 5/5: Shot on a mixture of 16mm black and white 'reversal' film (Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X), the film is grain central. The Itunes image captures all the grain and detail. The Japanese Blu-ray looks virtually identical, perhaps being only fractionally better in busy sequences. |
FTC Disclosure: I am an iTunes and Amazon affiliate advertiser, this means that if you click on one of the links above, I get a very small amount of money.