DVD details for for
The Piano (1993) More at IMDb Pro »

Michel Hafner (5 August 1999):
This DVD of Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) has some assets and some problems. Let's list them one by one.
The film master used is in good shape with few speckles and no problems with image steadiness. The many dark scenes of the movie are rendered accurately as far as color and contrast are concerned. The latter is occasionally a bit harsh and some highlights tend to clip.
Much less convincing is the noise and grain level which is too high to not be distracting. It also creates problems for the compression which must manage with a low average bit rate (only one layer available for 121 minutes). Laser Pacific does good work here and keeps the artifacts on a low level. There are also no distracting digital noise suppression artifacts, although it seems that some noise suppression has been applied. Not on a low level, but rather obvious, are the aliasing problems in many shots. Here the missing 16:9 enhancement is most missed. The sharpness is good for a non 16:9 enhanced transfer and over enhanced edges are no problem either.
The Maori dialogue is not subtitled which is bad since it's relevant to the interpretation of the film.
What we end up with is a quite watchable DVD with some shortcomings that should be addressed, namely a film master that is too grainy and a non 16:9 enhanced transfer, which has too much aliasing to avoid the video look. A higher bit rate and a new 5.1 mix would not be detrimental either. Let's hope for a new transfer and DVD that does this widely admired film full justice.