Then I put in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Warners has done a magnificent job with this DVD transfer. It is unquestionably the best the film has ever looked on home video. I have a laserdisc of it that's got muddy color and some print damage. None of that is present here: just wonderfully sharp, detailed images with robust color. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound might be a bit more hefty than the Dolby Surround track on my laserdisc, but it still needs more bass to my ears.
I didn't do any side by side comparisons; just operating on a yers old memory as regards the laserdisc.
One question: if they were going to shoot a new introduction with Omar Sharif, why not encode it for widescreen TVs? How stupid it is to have him stretched out of all proportion in a nonanamorphic sequence and then the film comes up with the correct dimensions? (It must have been shot in very low resolution video, too, because it was very soft with smeared color, too. For a second, my heart skipped a beat thinking the feature was going to look this awful.)