Why release House Of Blues on Blu Ray? It will look exactly the same as DVD, it's not like the source material is high def...
Actually, that's not entirely right. Some re-releases do not present greater quality, but that is because they didn't work with the original format. If the source has restrictions to its resolution than in the best case scenario you will look at an up-scaled version. A blue pixel would turn into four blue pixels and take up the same portion of the screen, but the image would technically have a higher resolution if you counted the amount of pixels.
If the movie was captured on film, the film itself will have a higher resolution than DVD. In fact, in many cases no up-scaling is needed for 1080p, which means that many 20+ year old movies are indeed in HD format. To add to that, they might even do digital restoration like removal of "noise" and manipulation of saturation and hue. In many cases, an old movie re-released to Blu-Ray is a huge improvement over the DVD release. Look into individual titles and google them along with something like "blu ray version quality" or similar things and check for yourself.
And to be philosophical about it, mastering digital art can be compared to any other creative venture like being a musician or a painter. In the world of music you have many famous mastering engineers who do nothing but normalize the recording based on industry standards. Some are good at it, some are bad. There are people who are good and bad at restoring video. Warner Bros. videos restored to Blu-Ray are normally ace I hear.
Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_mm
Even with the now-standard 35mm film, you are still dealing with film. The limitation of the amount of pixels across the screen lie in the device that captures the film and makes it digital, not in the film itself. The film is an "analogue" format and as such has no digital limitations. Until screens can show pixels smaller than atoms. Which means that there will always be a point in going back to an old movie and refreshing it using current technology. It's gonna happen for whatever comes after HD too.
More info:
Film
- 35 mm film is scanned for release on DVD at 1080 or 2000 lines as of 2005.
- 35 mm original camera negative motion picture film can resolve up to 6,000 lines.
- 35 mm projection positive motion picture film has about 2,000 lines which results from the analog printing from the camera negative of an interpositive, and possibly an internegative, then a projection positive.
- Sequences from newer films are scanned at 2,000, 4,000 or even 8,000 columns, called 2K, 4K and 8K, for quality visual-effects editing on computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution#Resolution_in_various_media
HD 1080p has 1080 lines.
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