4) Kam and Ronson - Region 'A" Blu-ray - RIGHT

ADDITION Kam & Ronson Blu-ray - August 2009: Everything appears to improve with the new 1080P Fortune Star sourced transfer but skin tones warm up quite a bit. This is superior, in my opinion than the orange flesh tones of the DVDs. It's hard to be positive which colors are most accurate but the Blu-ray advances quite handily in other areas with stronger detail via the higher resolution - actually, everything is tighter. We can state the validity of the transfer at 1080P. The dual-layered image looks pretty decent in motion. It's quite smooth, clean with a shade of depth. Despite it looking somewhat thick at times, it's vastly ahead of the DVDs. It's nice to see a bit of consistent grain. As far as the visual aspect goes this appears to look better than Fist Of Fury - also released on Blu-ray by Kam & Ronson.

Not unlike many Asian DVDs - there are some healthy options for the Blu-ray - as far as lossless we get Cantonese DTS-HD Master 7.1 at 2578 kbps 7.1, or a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 at 1848 kbps. There is also a 5.1-EX in both Mandarin Chinese and Thai DUBs. On the two HD audio options there is some range - perhaps more than one might expect. I eventually settled on the TrueHD but it was more a personal choice than feeling it was technically superior. The effect sounds of the fighting sequences sound reasonably crisp and explosive upon impact. Sometimes almost beyond the compatibility with the video. There are rather small white, often précised. optional English, traditional Chinese or Thai subtitles and my Momitsu can verify that this is indeed region 'A'-locked.

The 2.5 minute interview with Tung Wai (optionally subtitled) isn't much of an extra but it's all we are getting. He talks about his first meeting with Bruce Lee. It's good, if far too short and looks incredibly insignificant compared to HKL's Bey Logan commentary.

I suspect Bruce Lee fans will want to indulge - depending on your system the HD image can be a fairly big jump. Overall it looked solid and probably the best the title has ever appeared for home theater usage. The audio has some buoyancy and may surprise but it would have been great to have more supplements.

Gary Tooze

****

-Ole Kofoed

The picture of the Fortune Star DVD simply is beautiful. No cropping, crisp detail and natural colour scheme, this is the best presentation of his films yet. .

The sound is another story. The original mono just sounds good. The 5.1 and DTS have been manipulated, so there now is rear speaker action. This may be all fine and such, but the new added sounds are of different quality, so it ends up sounding inserted and wrong. Go with the mono, unless you cant help yourself.

 -Henrik Sylow