Well I had time to pop in the Fellowship just to make sure it worked and got a bit of a scare. At first absolutely nothing happened, well except my Oppo locked up. Having had this sort of thing happen before with my previous Oppo I unplugged and plugged back in the power cord and the disks loaded and played normally.
I watched a few scenes that I’ve seen 100s of time while testing my system. So without even doing an A/B comparison (which should be easy because it looks like the chapter breaks sync up with the DVD version) I can already say a few things.
In most scenes the PQ is noticeably sharper, though in a few scenes I don’t think there is a noticeable difference. In these cases the original DVD scenes was already ultra-sharp looking. In the scenes that look better not only is the image sharper but the colour depth is better. Both combine to give a more “3D” or deeper looking image. The better colour depth is even very noticeable in the dark scenes in the Mines of Moria.
Only two things jumped out at me about the audio quality. First was that in a few scenes where in the original DVD there is some sibilance in Gandalf’s voice it’s much worse in the BD version. OTOH, in the Mines of Moria DVD version were the background music actually drowned out the scene it’s toned down a bit in the BD version complementing rather than overshadowing the on screen action. As for the LFE and surround sound I couldn’t detect any noticeable difference.
Also, I can say if the colour was off or not. If the whole movie was made that way I don’t see it being an issue though it might be noticeable A/B comparing or initially switching between movies.
