  Can you see the difference? We can.
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NEW YORK -- Film restoration has reached a new zenith, but consumers still are not seeing everything there is to see in a movie such as The Wizard of Oz.
That is the message today from Ned Price, vice-president of mastering and technical operations at Warner Bros. studio.
"For the home consumer, I would say that the DVD disc has a lot more information on it than you can see at home, because of the limitations of your monitors, which is a bit frustrating to me because I would like to show you everything that is on that disc."
Meanwhile, on Blu-ray, "it looks very good and better than you've ever seen. But there is more on that disc than you can see. The weakest link in the chain for the consumer is the monitoring device you have at home."
The differences between plasma, LCD and projection TV systems also complicate things.
"In terms of the monitoring device, we're kind of all over the map right now. (But) I see in the next few years that things will greatly improve and you will still be able to enjoy the disc more and more because you'll see more into what is there."
The Wizard of Oz is expected to sell well. But preservation is worth it for its own sake for all films, even if some people don't understand why so much money and effort is put into the process, Price says.
"Why should anyone care? Because they are works of art. They are part of our heritage."
In the case of The Wizard of Oz, Price's team went back to the original camera negative as its first reference. The results are impressive -- and obvious, even with today's TVs.
"The difference is that you can see more detail in the costumes, which are brilliant. But it also allows me, when we're working with it, to get better colour imagery. In the older versions, for instance, we were always fighting green. There are things that are intended to be green but the flesh tones are not supposed to be green and earlier colour corrections did not have the power to make the differentiation and to isolate to the degree that we can now."
