When I went downstairs, the mail HAD come, and included was a box of DVDs I had been expecting. The one from the box that was at the top of my list was the Ultimate Edition of THUNDERBALL. I have not seen any of the new digitally cleaned and remastered versions of the james Bond movies. I was not actually planning on replacing all 20 that I have in their Special Edition DVDs, but I had decided I'd wait until high def Blu-ray versions of the Connerys and a few others were made available whenever that might be.
However, Amazon placed the one disc movie editions of the remasters on sale last week, and I decided to try one - THUNDERBALL, probably my least favorite Connery/Bond film.
ANyway, I watched about 100 minutes of it tonight before prime time started. Lowry has cleaned every possible dirt, speck, hair, and scratch from previous editions of the films, and the films are definitely cleaner than I have ever seen them on home video (and I've owned the tapes, the laserdiscs, and those Special Edition DVDs). However, the images are not consistently saturated and lush looking. Much of it does look solid and colorful, but sometimes, flesh tones are paler than at other moments, and contrast also seems perfect most of the time but not ALL of the time.
The new DTS surround track is AWESOME. Sounds like a brand new movie and eons ahead of the surround track that has been on previous editions.