Review for The Dish (Updated)

2 / 10

Statement From Roadshow

Quote:
22 May 2017

ROADSHOW RECALLS THE DISH BLU-RAY
‘YOU’RE NOT HAPPY, WE’RE NOT HAPPY. LET’S GET THEM BACK AND START AGAIN.’

Dear movie fan and valued customer,
We understand that you love watching movies the way they were meant to be watched - with the best picture and sound quality. This is especially true if you have purchased Blu-ray with the expectation of a High Definition experience. We apologise that The Dish on Blu-ray was of inferior quality and did not meet your expectations. The current conversion of the original 35mm film onto Blu-ray is disappointing... and certainly not befitting one of Australia’s most cherished and admired films. Roadshow is truly sorry for this and would also like to take this opportunity to apologise to the film-makers, as we know their commitment to delivering the utmost quality is of paramount importance.

Effective immediately, we are implementing a total, national recall of all stock of The Dish Blu- ray. If you have bought a copy of The Dish on Blu-ray, please return it to your place of purchase and a full refund will be given to you.

We have also fast-tracked the production of a brand-new re-mastered version in High Definition. This time, the quality of The Dish Blu-ray will be befitting of the film itself. Where we have customer’s details, we will personally inform you of the release date of the new remaster.

Once again, our sincere apologies,
The team at Roadshow
That was re-posted on the Blu-ray.com forum, and if like me you imported the disc, it's well worth contacting the retailer you ordered it from. Despite being halfway around the world, I did get a refund. Hopefully things will turn out better for The Dish on the second try.

Let the Buyer Beware

There are films that I love so much, that I want them in the best quality possible, and will shell out, sight unseen on a Blu-ray upgrade. The Dish is one such film, a heart-warming Australian comedy telling the tale of the Parkes Radio Telescope, which in 1969 had the responsibility of relaying the television images of the Apollo 11 moon landing. You can bet that when I learned that it was going to get a Blu-ray release in its native Australia, I had placed a pre-order faster than you can blink.

I adore this film. Here’s my review of the DVD, which should give you some reason as to why. Read it, try and find a copy of the Icon DVD and order it, you won’t be disappointed. This is where I would have written another ode to one of my favourite films, celebrating its Blu-ray debut, only I’m not going to. Instead, I’m warning you to avoid this disc like the plague. It may be cheap, but it’s still a waste of money, and once you put the disc in your player, your disappointment will make it feel like a wholesale economic collapse of a waste. It’s bad enough that I didn’t even watch the film; I just skipped through to confirm my worst nightmare.

The Dish gets perhaps the worst SD upscale I have yet seen on a Blu-ray. It’s hideous. All the aliasing, stair-stepping, shimmer, moiré and other artefacts associated with a bad upscale are here, from a source print with faded colours, excessive print damage and an unstable image. You may get a DTS-HD MA 5.1 English audio track, but it sounds just like the Dolby Digital audio on the DVD and in terms of extras, you can forget the cornucopia of material that was on the DVD. You only get the small making of featurette and a handful of trailers in 576i PAL format. The only thing on this disc in HD, other than the main menu screen is the Photo Gallery slideshow. Your player will do a better job of scaling up the DVD to an HD screen than the authors did in creating this disc.