Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 4K Blu-ray 2009 REMUX UHD 2160P

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 4K Blu-ray download delivers stunning video and reference-quality audio in this excellent Blu-ray release. Emboldened by the return of Lord Voldemort, the Death Eaters are wreaking havoc in both the Muggle and wizarding worlds and Hogwarts is no longer the safe haven it once was. Harry suspects that new dangers may lie within the castle, but Dumbledore is more intent upon preparing him for the final battle that he knows is fast approaching. He needs Harry to help him uncover a vital key to unlocking Voldemort's defenses critical information known only to Hogwarts' former Potions Professor, Horace Slughorn. With that in mind, Dumbledore manipulates his old colleague into returning to his previous post with promises of more money, a bigger office and the chance to teach the famous Harry Potter.

For more about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 4K and the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 4K Blu-ray release, see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 4K Blu-ray download Review published by Michael Reuben on April 11, 2017 where this Blu-ray release scored 4.0 out of 5.

According to the best available information, Warner's 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD presentation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has been sourced from a 2K digital intermediate, which limits the prospect that the format's superior resolution will reveal additional detail. Still, the HDR encoding provides subtle but noticeable improvements over the standard Blu-ray, courtesy of enhanced contrast, black levels and highlights. As with The Order of the Phoenix, the effect is most noticeable in large, crowded expanses, e.g., the Room of Requirement where Draco is repairing a Vanishing Cabinet hidden amongst stacks of other objects, the crowded Christmas dinner table at the Weasleys with Harry and others joining the whole family, or the huge field of reeds into which Harry runs (and others follow) when the Weasley home is attacked by Bellatrix Lestrange and her posse.

The palette of The Half-Blood Prince on UHD download continues the trend toward darkening and desaturation by director David Yates that can been seen in all four of his Potter films, even though they are the work of three different cinematographers—Slawomir Idziak for The Order of the Phoenix, Bruno Delbonnel for this film and Eduardo Serra for The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2. Here, as in The Order of the Phoenex, the UHD's creators seem to have taken Yates's preference for darkness even further, and the effect is most pronounced in the lengthy scene in a seaside cave where Harry and Dumbledore look for a Horcrux at the bottom of a poisonous fountain. On Blu-ray, the scene was already drained of color to a point that approached black-and-white photography, but on UHD the last vestiges of color have been removed, including the slight reddish tint of Harry's jacket. With the deeper blacks, added contrast and enhanced highlights of HDR, the scene is now strikingly stark in its focused intensity, like something from a classic horror film—which is appropriate, since the scene concludes with a horde of zombie-like Inferi swarming to the attack. The remainder of Half-Blood Prince appears to have been regraded with a similar eye to adding darkness and reducing color, though nowhere as obviously noticeable as the cave sequence. As in Order of the Phoenix, the brightest colors are reserved for magic, including the mystically-induced flames that Bellatrix and her gang ignite to encircle, and then destroy, the Weasley home.

[System calibrated using a Klein K10-A Colorimeter with a custom profile created with a Colorimetry Research CR250 Spectraradiometer, powered by SpectracCal CalMAN 2016 5.7, using the Samsung Reference 2016 UHD HDR 10 BIT downoad Blu-ray test disc authored by Florian Friedrich from AV Top in Munich, Germany. Calibration performed by Kevin Miller of ISFTV.]


Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 4K Blu-ray, Audio Quality 5.0 of 5
Previous releases of The Half-Blood Prince contained a 5.1 soundtrack (in either Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA), but the UHD arrives with a DTS:X soundtrack that, on audio systems not yet equipped to decode that format, should play as DTS-HD MA 7.1. The previous mix was a first-rate soundtrack, as noted by Kenneth Brown's review: "Blazing flame serpents, a cursed young girl, a battle of wands, a crowded marketplace, Dumbledore's teleportation, a rush of recalled memories, a horde of undead guardians, an enraged master wizard, a harrowing field chase and many other absolutely electric magic-infused scenes take full advantage of the LFE channel and rear speakers." The DTS:X encoding refines these effects and expands the listening space even further. The Dementor attack that opens the films is even more active and enveloping, and the destruction of the Millennium Bridge carries even more sonic impact. The Christmas attack on the Weasley residence is even more forceful, with an expanded sense of the attackers' flight and a larger auditory sense of the reedy field into which Harry pursues Bellatrix. Dumbledore's reassembly of the Muggle residence where he and Harry first find Horace Slughorne (Jim Broadbent) sounds like it's happening all around you, as glass tinkles into coherent shapes and pottery and bric-a-brac clatter back into their rightful place. Similar enhancements are audible throughout, but none of them comes at the expense of dialogue intelligibility or the reproduction of Nicholas Hooper's score.

It should be noted that "object-based" sound formats are designed to be adaptive, and DTS:X in particular touts its ability to adjust to a wide variety of speaker configurations. Still, the degree to which the new mix produces audible benefits in the home theater will no doubt vary depending on individual sound systems and speaker arrays. For reference, I listened to The Half-Blood Prince on a 7.1.2 speaker configuration, consisting of front left, right and center, and two each of side, rear and "height" speakers, plus subwoofer.