DVD details for for
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Michel Hafner (24 October 1999):
This is the first disc in the 8 disc "Nightmare on Elm Street" series from New Line (the last disc is a supplements only disc). It's a promising start for the series but there is a problem I'll address in a few moments.
The film master used is clean. Image steadiness is ok, but not good enough to avoid problems with the noise processing, unfortunately. Color and contrast rendition are good. So is sharpness which is often close to what we see on top DVDs from the latest releases, but it suffers from noise processing.
The noise and grain level is mostly low and never distracting. Compression is good. I have seen no glitches. What I have seen plenty of, though, are noise processing artifacts. They are in many scenes and usually slight, but not always. There are distracting instances of flickering that are caused by gate weave plus noise processing trying to stabilize the image but failing. Two examples: chapter 8: 0:06-0:09 (the label reading "Toshiba" is twitching), chapter 13: 2:08-2:17 (the brightly lit door in the middle is twitching badly). This twitching/flickering is in many shots. In addition textures in motion are often somewhat messed up and/or lose fine detail. This is rather disturbing and disappointing since it shows that even top quality DVD labels such as "New Line" are not immune to this all pervasive noise processing and its undesirable and often ugly side effects. People in the mastering houses are not (yet) enough aware that noise processing belongs in the hands of a specialist, must be carried out with great delicacy and, very important, with hardware flexible and sophisticated enough to avoid visible artifacts. The problems of this DVD may be invisible on the average interlaced TV set from a vewing distance of several screen heights. They sure are not invisible on a high quality monitor or on a large screen using a good projector. And they are definitely not ok and acceptable if good image quality is the goal. The industry needs to wake up and get the message: The best transfer on the latest teleciné and the best compression with the highest bit rate is rather pointless when the result is that you can see the noise processing artifacts all the better in the clean imagery.
This first DVD in the "Freddy series" is a bit of a disappointment because of the noise processing problems, but apart from that quality is good. The new 5.1 Dolby Digital remix is much more impressive than the old mono soundtrack.

Michel Hafner (4 November 1999):
This is the second disc in the 8 disc "Nightmare on Elm Street" series from New Line (the last disc is a supplements only disc). Image quality is uneven but on average disappointing.
The film master used is clean. Image steadiness is mostly ok, but a couple of times bad. The opening shots of chapter 3 are very unstable, for example. Contrast and color are good throughout. A couple of shots show some color bleeding. Sharpness is uneven but on average ok. Not ok is the noise and grain level that is too high and distracting in several scenes. Probably the worst scene in this regard is the opening nightmare. Also not ok is the amount of video artifacts. There is little aliasing, but some overenhanced edges, ghosting around outlines, and worst of all, digital noise removal artifacts of the usual kind, occasionally ugly ones. The worst example here: Chapter 7: 0:34-0:39 (presumably gate weave derailing the noise suppression and creating severe flickering). Finally we have a compression with a high average bit rate that is not the quality bottleneck of this DVD. It's quite good given the grainy material.
This second DVD in New Line's "Nightmare series" is considerably less good looking than the average high quality DVD from this label. Hampered by a grainy master and suboptimal noise processing quality is uneven, mostly so so, occasionally pretty good and a few times awful. Definitely not as we like our New Line DVDs. Too bad. I hope this is not the direction the rest of the discs are heading.

(1984) The nightmare that started it all gets the "Infinifilm" treatment in a new special edition. John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, and Heather Langenkamp star, but it's Robert Englund that stole the film as the dead child killer who returns as a demon who murders his teen victims in their dreams. Johnny Depp has an early role as part of the body count.