Some older films have already had hi-def transfers to HD DVD. I already watched the HD DVD version of Spartacus from Netflix. And one of the free HD DVDs available from Toshiba with the purchase of a player is Casablanca.
If there's one company that seems really committed to high-def digital, it's Universal. They have a really nice HD station, Universal HD, which shows really nice 1080 digital transfers of movies going back 15-20 years, plus the Northern Exposure series. Anything they show on that network means they've already done a high-rez digital transfer, and many if not all the films they show there are--or probably will be--available on HD DVD.
Universal has 129 HD DVDs available to date, and many of them are from 10-20 years ago, some vintage. To see them all, click here and click the [Next] button to flip through their offerings. So far everything from them that I've seen on the UHD channel or on HD DVD has looked really good. In the case of Spartacus, the limiting factor was the film grain itself, not the digital resolution.
If there's one company that seems really committed to high-def digital, it's Universal. They have a really nice HD station, Universal HD, which shows really nice 1080 digital transfers of movies going back 15-20 years, plus the Northern Exposure series. Anything they show on that network means they've already done a high-rez digital transfer, and many if not all the films they show there are--or probably will be--available on HD DVD.
Universal has 129 HD DVDs available to date, and many of them are from 10-20 years ago, some vintage. To see them all, click here and click the [Next] button to flip through their offerings. So far everything from them that I've seen on the UHD channel or on HD DVD has looked really good. In the case of Spartacus, the limiting factor was the film grain itself, not the digital resolution.