DVD details for
Titanic (1997) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (10 October 1999):
This DVD edition of the decade's financially most successful film, Titanic (1997) is not the definitive NTSC DVD edition of this blockbuster. It's not 16:9 enhanced and has a couple of problems. But it's quite watchable nonetheless.
The film master used is very clean, practically impeccable, and image steadiness is very good. No complaints here, this is state of the art. Color reproduction looked good to me too. There is some color banding in a couple of underwater shots at the beginning, and some color bleeding (watch the sign next to Rose when she attempts suicide, the red bleeds into the white). But there is a problem with the contrast. While blacks are deep and shadow detail not lacking, highlights often look crushed and/or clipped and extend over too large an area without any gradation. This looks unnatural. Have a look at the big dome on the ship. The bright white blooms and occasionally erases the supporting structure. Or watch Rose on the way to the ship. The lines on her dress drown in the white and disappear completely at times. It's also on the Laserdisc and part of the master tape, it seems.
Sharpness is uneven. Since the DVD is not 16:9 enhanced it misses the additional 33% scanlines an enhanced DVD has. This lack of detail is evident in many of the scenes playing during the day. Scenes at night are far less affected and look generally considerably better than the daylight scenes, sharper and less noisy. That's because compression noise and film grain is far less visible in dark imagery and sharpness profits from the fact that most of the information is coming from the full resolution luminance channel and not the half resolution color difference channels.
The noise and grain level is mostly low, but some of the daylight scenes suffer from fine grain that is distorted by compression noise, giving skin and other textures an unnatural and fuzzy look. The average bit rate is too low to avoid slight compression artifacts in most scenes, but I have seen no bad glitches. There is a strange ringing around people's contours in chapter 6 (see 2:26-2:35). It's also on the Laserdisc. One of the paintings shows a compression glitch (parts floating around). This scene is the worst looking scene of this DVD. As far as video artifacts are concerned there is, as expected, quite some aliasing present in many shots. It's not yet distracting though, but could have been greatly reduced by enhancing the disc. Fortunately there are no overenhanced edges and I have also seen no distracting noise processing artifacts. That's a relief.
This DVD version of "Titanic" is of pretty good quality, but it can not hide the fact that it's not state of the art what we are getting here. The missing enhancement prevents us from getting optimal sharpness and leads to some aliasing artifacts. The low average bit rate plus not state of the art compression creates compression problems on bright scenes with fine grain and detail. And highlights are not optimally mapped to DVDs 8 bits. If image quality is very important for you wait until an enhanced version becomes available. Such a version should be released on a double side dual layer disc since it needs more bits than this version to keep compression quality constant and then some more to improve on it. Squeezing a widescreen version and a Pan & Scan version on the same 4 layer disc would be a bad idea. Both versions would suffer and look worse than this version unless considerably better/more efficient compression software is used this time. I hope James Cameron will give us this high bit rate and 16:9 enhanced widescreen version next year. If not I'll have to live without this film in my collection until he does (review is based on borrowed copy).