DVD details for
Excalibur (1981) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (3 October 1999):
This DVD edition by Warner Brothers of Excalibur (1981) is, as far as I'm concerned, disappointing, especially considering that this is a brand new 16:9 enhanced transfer and not a rehash of an older transfer made for Laserdisc. Image quality is uneven and never comes close to a state of the art presentation. That's a pity, given the visual splendor of this film and its reputation. The other two DVDs about the legend of Arthur I have seen are better looking, especially Columbia/Tristar's First Knight (1995).
The film master used is more or less clean and image steadiness is still acceptable, but neither is as we like it. There are too many speckles for my taste and there's horizontal image wavering in many shots. Contrast and color rendition as well as sharpness suffer from the choice of a film master which is too grainy to give good results. Blacks are deep and shadow detail is mostly good. And colors look accurate to me as well. But how much better would the impression be if the imagery were far less grainy and fine image detail available instead of drowning in noise and looking like an ant hill on many occasions. Yes, image sharpness leaves a great deal to be desired for an enhanced transfer. Many shots offer poor detail with the occasional sharp shot confirming the rule. The noise and grain level is often too high to remain unobtrusive. A couple of times it becomes distracting and ugly (such as in the shot at 2:00-2:06 in chapter 36).
No good news from the video artifacts front either. First there are noise suppression artifacts in the form of image jitter and distorted textures. The jitter is due to image parts being randomly moved around by the noise processing. Examples are in chapter 3 from 2:02-2:06 where the central image part is dancing around, and in chapter 9 starting at 2:04 (Excalibur is wobbling like we were watching a VHS tape with time base problems). There are no scenes that are not more or less affected and diminished by noise and noise processing artifacts. Secondly, as if this were not enough, we also have luminance/chrominance delay which creates unwanted coloring around contours. Have a look at chapter 4 starting at 1:47 and watch the outlines of Merlin and the rocks. On the right side they look yellowish and on the left bluish. Or check out chapter 17 at 2:37... where white steel swords are hold up and cross a red flag. Whenever they are in front of the flag the red spills over into the swords and colors them red as well. No, this is not 'ordinary' color bleeding, this is lumincance/chrominance delay. And it's ugly and easily avoidable. There's no excuse for this in a new transfer than outright sloppiness. Compression is using a relatively high average bit rate of around 5.5 Mbit/s and is good, given the compression-unfriendly nature of this grainy master. I have seen no glitches.
All in all this DVD is disappointing image quality wise. It will look quite decent on smaller screens with moderate resolution power but falls badly apart on a high resolution monitor or when projected with a good video projector. It is not a good substitute for the real thing, a high quality theatrical print, and the wonderful imagery of this film is only superficially tapped. This film deserves a much better DVD release. And Warner Brothers have proven once more that their output is uneven. One day a winner like _Matrix, The (1999)_ and another day a loser like Excalibur (1981). But stop, could it not be much worse? It could indeed. Have a look at the trailer on the DVD and you will see worse. There are labels that would not shy away from releasing the whole movie looking like that.
The commentary by John Boorman is an asset. There is also a new 5.1 mix on the DVD. Nice, but I'd rather have a mint original mono track and a superior picture instead. This DVD should be remastered from a lower generation film master with less grain. I can not recommend it unless image quality is not very important to you.