300

Reviewer: Max Everingham

With many of our Blu-ray reviews, we’re going to be looking at movies that have been released already on DVD, sometimes quite a while back. So the thing with Blu-ray will be to see what the spanking new format adds to the titles – is it, in short, worth buying instead of, or as well as, the DVD version?

With 300, the highly-stylised production does the Blu-ray format a great disservice – very noisy images, thanks to actual computer-generated noise, and not helped by the director’s treatment of colour, contrast, blacks and detail.

The original 2.40:1 aspect ratio is preserved, a good thing, while that intentional ‘degrading’ of the film stock means that the image quality of the extras – of which there’s a really decent selection, with the webisodes as a highlight – strikes you as better than the main feature film.

Intentional or not, it’s possibly not what you expect from your new Blu-ray collection. Most of the extras are in high definition too, which is good to see when so many software houses aren’t making that extra effort. Only two deleted scenes, disappointingly.