Sherlock Holmes 4K review

Sep 12, 2020- Permalink

Guy Ritchies’s 2009 Sherlock Holmes, which stars Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, and Rachel McAdams, sees Holmes and Watson taking on a case that has occultists threatening the seat of power in the UK. The high energy adventure has now been given the 4K Ultra HD treatment by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. I was given a review copy of the disc by WBHE, but as always the opinions below are my own.

The 2160p HEVC / H.265-encoded HDR10 transfer is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. The image has a great amount of detail in skin, textiles and environmental elements but it’s not a vast improvement over the previous Blu-ray as the movie was shot in 2K, so this transfer is an upscaling. The colour palette has an almost sepia tone look to it, which is a stylistic choice that helps bring you into the era and the damp, foggy gloom of its London. When there is a pop of colour, it’s noticeable and the HDR10 does it’s stuff with adding some zing to the highlights, as in moments where the sun peeks out from a cloud or light reflects off the water. The image does have some softness at times. Black levels are fairly good, though there is the occasional crushing. There doesn’t appear noticeable compression artifacts or digital noise and the image does have a slight film grain. It’s a very good video transfer and some of the aspects of it are due to artistic choices.

Your ears have the choice of an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack or French, German, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Thai Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. Subtitles are available in English SDH, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified and Traditional), Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, and Thai. The soundtrack is the same DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track as on the previous Blu-ray release. Though it would have been nice to update it to a Dolby Atmos or DTS-X soundtrack, this is still a very good soundtrack. The surround speakers put you in the action with good ambient placement and the low frequency moments will have your subwoofer adding some extra oomph in the action scenes. Dialogue is centred, clear, and well-prioritized and the score is clean and dynamic.

The 4K combo pack of Sherlock Holmes comes with a Blu-ray copy and a digital code. There are no extras on the 4K disc, they’re all located on the Blu-ray disc. These extras are the same as on the 2010 Blu-ray because…wait for it…this is the 2010 Blu-ray. There’s a Maximum Movie Mode, a full-length picture-in-picture commentary from director Guy Ritchie, a Focus Points featurette that is essentially the best elements of the full-length commentary, and a short featurette on the production.

Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes gives us a lot of great action and a wonderful pairing in Downey Jr. and Law. With a great 4K video presentation and a good soundtrack, you won’t go wrong adding this 4K to your collection.