James Cameron: Forget streaming, Blu-ray is the gold standard

If you want to watch movies in HD properly, then you should stick to Blu-ray, says director James Cameron.

At the launch of Titanic on 3D Blu-ray, with TechRadar in attendance, Cameron revealed that Blu-ray offers the closest 'cinema' experience anyone will get of Titanic in the home and despite the movie being an Ultra HD remaster, he believes little was lost in the move to Blu-ray.

"I am a big of the Blu-ray format and it is a great opportunity for people to get HD and see the films essentially at the full resolution the film was originally authored at," explained Cameron.

"2K is pretty much the authoring standard for visual effects these days. So most movies, not withstanding all the hoopla about 4K, are shot in 2K film.

"This is how you see it in the cinema and this is what you pretty much see with Blu-ray. You are losing very little picture intonation, if any at all, and we are proud of our result in Blu-ray."

Despite being pleased with 2K, Cameron did use 4K to remaster the movie, noting: "We did all our work in Ultra HD – we captured all we can from the negative – then came down [to 2K] for the release and we are really pleased with it, it's vibrant and beautiful."

Gold standard

Cameron's love for Blu-ray is easy to see – the release of Titanic contains six hours of archived footage and two new documentaries – so it's no surprise that he prefers the format over streaming but it's not just the value-added content Blu-ray offers but better overall visual quality.

"We really hope that Blu-ray flourishes as you have bitrate issues with streaming.

"There's HD and there's HD and there's highly compressed HD that you get with streaming and the satellite formats and so on, so it is going to be a while before you get to the standard of Blu-ray.

"Consumers need to understand that Blu-ray is the gold standard. Although Moore's Law does say that Ultra HD will eventually come as a distribution standard but it's going to be a few years away."

Titanic is available now on Blu-ray and 3D Blu-ray, and will be bundled with selected Panasonic home-entertainment systems.