“Ars was recently able to conclude that the newly launched iTunes movies encoded in 1080p do, in fact, look better than the same content encoded in 720p, despite the modest increase in file size,” Iljitsch van Beijnum reports for Ars Technica. “That’s good news for iTunes customers. But the real question is: How do iTunes 1080p downloads compare to the reigning king of home video image quality—Blu-ray Disc (BRD)? This is what we set out to test.”
“Things started out well for iTunes with the movie’s titles, which look very sharp on both BRD and iTunes 1080p,” van Beijnum reports. “An early scene that shows a ship on the ice-filled sea also shows that iTunes 1080p almost matches Blu-ray’s level of detail… Color reproduction is almost identical.”
van Beijnum reports, “I was surprised to see how close the iTunes 1080p download comes to Blu-ray, considering that it’s only a fraction of the file size.”
Read more, and see the comaprison screenshots, in the full article here.
