The Dark Knight Trilogy 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray tried and tested

Seven acclaimed films from director Christopher Nolan have been released in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, including the modern classic Dark Knight trilogy. The game-changing films featuring Christian Bale as Batman – and iconic villains Ra’s Al Ghul, Joker and Bane – are also available individually. The remastered Blu-rays include a range of features such as High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wider Color Spectrum. These performance advances allow viewers to more accurately experience the filmmaker’s original vision, offering consumers brighter, deeper, more lifelike colours for a home entertainment viewing experience like never before.

“4K Ultra HD is an incredibly exciting new home video format that allows a much closer recreation of viewing the original film print,” said Christopher Nolan. “The deeper colour palette comes closer to matching the analogue colours of film and we’ve restored the original theatrical mixes for this release. If you can’t rewatch these films in the theatre, this is the best experience you can have in your own home.”

The level of detail is phenomenal and the visual shifts between IMAX (shot in 65mm, therefore filling the screen completely) and 35mm scenes (showing black bars) are much smoother thanks to the greater contrast. Wally Pfister’s cinematography has never been so glorious – and so the madness of the Joker.

In order to watch these films you’ll need both a 4K TV and a 4K Blu-ray player; however, each film includes a standard Blu-ray version in case you have more than one player and you want to watch it on a system that is not 4K yet. We used the two formats to compare them and the quality difference is impressive. The audio comes with a new codec too, DTS-HD MA rather than Dolby TrueHD: however, because they are both lossless, there won’t be a perceivable change.

Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises are available individually as well: each one features the film on 4K Ultra HD, a Blu-ray disc of the same film (Full HD), a bonus Blu-ray with behind-the-scenes content and special features, and a digital copy.

The editorial unit

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk are also available in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.