anyone see the Hi Def version?(unbelievable )

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man I am lovin this MGM channel in HD! I'm watching this movie now and it just looks spectacular. I've got a 56inch jvc lcos tv and I just love discovering these old movies in HD that look so great in HD.

yes I have tried some film noir movies on dvd and a lot of them look almost as perfect in glorious black and white.if you're not already a netflix guy, it's great for getting those film noir movies. they have tons and tons of them.

Yes, I have Dish Network and love MGM HD. All the old films look great, as well they should as film has more resolution than an HDTV. I thought the picture on this transfer was very good.

A lot of the old television shows have also been remastered in HD, as many of them were shot on cinema stock and are widescreen by default.

Hogan's Heroes, Flipper, Thunderbirds. I wish Dish had kept some of the ZOOM channels, as Family Room and Monster HD were two very good channels I watched a lot of.

I'm older and saw all the '70s and '80s studio releases in 35mm, either at theaters or screening rooms. The difference between a pristene 35mm print and HDTV will always be there -read Marshall McLuan and you'll see there is automatically a difference in medium between projection (with a theater length throw, not a few feet for tv) and the tv playback. Shooting in HD to imitate a film is a wasted effort -at its best HD is Wide World of Sports Time. Aspect ratio is width to height, not the level of magnification or pixels. The problem in recent years is that older films are not revived (other than the most important titles) in 35mm, in revival theaters like in past decades when many art houses still existed. Buffs today want to see films in better & better versions, but do not have access to studio archive 35mm prints to show in one's private screening room (unless you're at the Obama level I guess). You have to realize that you are watching a different medium, and perhaps what will end up most appealing to you is Video shot in HD, and then played back in HD, not film stock/film negative movies played back in HD. The concept that digitizing a film shot ON FILM and then playing it back digitally can improve the quality is a complete fallacy; the analogy is with Audio Recording, where true audio buffs have gone back to analog LPs, with vacuum tube playback systems in order to recapture the warm, true original sound that is completely lost with digital re-recording/playback. (Even reissues are now being made from master tapes using vacuum tube technology to create brandnew vinyl LPs with the quality of the '50s originals.) They have nothing in common. The lighting issues are night and day (no pun intended). Ask a cinematographer to explain the difference. The clue to understanding what the maximum look of film noir could be is even more complicated; pre-early '50s all film prints were nitrate -you know, the stuff that causes fires and has been carefully replaced (or allowed to disintegrate) in the past 40 years as part of film preservation. I was fortunate to see some classic films noirs and other great black & white films in 35mm nitrate prints before the museums and art houses stopped showing them for insurance reasons -there is a drastic increase in contrast, sheen, just the gleam of surfaces in a beautifully shot black & white classic film as projected from a nitrate print that cannot be reproduced on modern 35mm stock, and will also be lost to some extent on HDTV playback. This is one of the reasons that modern day black & white films, not just foreign but Woody Allen/Jarmusch/Coen Bros., always look a bit drab and washed out compared to some classic era James Wong Howe b&w film. If you ever get to do a comparison test you will know what I mean; a parallel I remember was in the '70s on campus when we were showing a 70mm film and one reel was missing, so we had to project that reel in 35mm -obtained as a replacement from the distributor, and a similar situation occurred where you could see, at the reel changes, the drastic difference between the two formats for exactly the same film (shot in 65mm) -I think it was Oklahoma or a similar vintage epic.

You could swear it was filmed this year(not "73")

'I supposedly have one of the more advanced Samsung LCD's out(25,000 to 1 aspect ratio)'

Now *that's* widescreen! (I think you meant contrast ratio?). But all joking aside, the film still looks gorgeous and saturated.

It was shut in true Panavision, in which the image took up only half the frame (two sprockets vs. four) but was a full picture. Begining in the 1970s, widescreen films began to be filmed with the full frame, and the resulting image was then letterboxed -- sometimes at the theater. That way, you could create a 4:3 print for TV.

TV had begun objecting to the cost of "panning and scanning" widescreen movies like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and the WILD BUNCH (Guerico says in his commentary track that the TV people had fits panning and scanning this film as Conrad Hall filled the frame so fully). A 4:3 bull's eye was put into camera lenses and the main action was confined to a 4:3 equivalent in a composition (whereever it would appear on screen) so the film eventually could be sold to TV with a minimal amount of fuss.

A film like ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE would thus have more detail than a film shot on the full frame and then subsequnetly letter-boxed, I would think. I also would think a film shot on VistaVision, which used the equivalent of two frames, would hold even more detail.

The thing is: Conrad Hall was a brilliant cinematographer.

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"Why do people always laugh in the wrong places?"
-- The Sundance Kid

It's interesting to me, personally, that you should mention the visuals.

I saw this movie in the theater (aka 35mm) and, all these years later, I still remember the visuals. I was not a particularly observant or discerning kid -- so it must have been something pretty special.