There is still a place for television on our Blu-ray shelves. While streaming has hindered the physical media market for movies, it has done even more damage to television, making it harder and harder to buy personal copies of your favorite shows. This is especially true when those shows are originals to streaming services, which is becoming more and more common. Fortunately, there are exceptions to these trends, and one of the newest hits from Amazon MGM Studios serves as a great reminder of how useful physical media can be in the TV space.
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Last week, Amazon released the first season of Fallout on 4K UHD and Blu-ray, with the former getting standard and limited SteelBook editions. This isn’t the first original show Amazon has given a physical release, but this 4K version (specifically the SteelBook, if you’re able to get your hands on one) is far and away the best release we’ve seen from a Prime Video title. It delivers fantastic quality, is absolutely packed with special features, and provides a perfect collectible piece for the shelf of any fan — something longtime Fallout game players are certainly happy about.
Amazon and Warner Bros. (who produced the physical release) provided ComicBook a copy of the Fallout 4K SteelBook to check out, and it’s every bit as good as I’d hoped. The SteelBook is immaculate, but the real reason for excitement is the quality of the show itself.
Fallout Season 1 4K & Blu-ray
If you’ve talked to any physical media collector about the merits of owning movies versus streaming, one of the first things any of them will bring up is the fact that streaming just can’t match the quality of a good disc. The compression necessary to allow all of these movies and shows to exist on a streaming server and be pulled up on-demand requires a drop-off in quality. Even if you have a streaming plan that includes 4K streaming, it is not the same as watching something directly from a physical disc.
Amazon, traditionally, has been the most noticeable of the streaming services when it comes to this compression and lack of streaming quality. Colors and contrast can change for certain scenes in a show, seemingly just to make something brighter than it’s supposed to be so it won’t lose your attention. Blacks will become totally washed out without warning and a show will go from looking like a 4K disc to looking like a DVD in a matter of seconds. There’s very little consistency. Personally, I’ve noticed these issues more with Reacher than any other show, but it is a very common complaint amongst a lot of Prime Video users.
I say all of that to point out just how magnificent Fallout looks when it isn’t streaming. This is a wacky show full of texture and bright colors. Not to mention it was shot entirely on 35mm film. It should be breathtaking all the time and this 4K release achieves that. You don’t get that inconsistency on the disc that you do when you stream the show, and the picture is much closer to what Jonathan Nolan and his team originally shot.
If you’re a fan of Fallout, this is the best way to watch the show and it really isn’t all that close, especially with the inclusion of Dolby Vision. That said, the standard Blu-ray is still an improvement on the streaming version, mainly because of its consistency.
The perfect image is enough to make the Fallout 4K release worth your while, but the folks that put this together also went to great lengths to make this feel like the great home media releases of years past, filling it to the brim with special features. Nolan and star Walton Goggins have a full commentary track for the series premiere, which can be accessed as an audio track on the episode or as its own special features, where you can watch the duo chat about the show. There are a dozen more features to explore beyond that commentary, most of which offer a great insight into how the show was brought to life.
This is the kind of physical release we don’t get a lot of nowadays, especially when it comes to television. Hopefully this will help set a new standard moving forward and other great streaming shows will be able to follow its lead.
You can purchase your copy of Fallout Season 1 here on Amazon.
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Image Courtesy of Paramount -
Image Courtesy of Big Finish Productions.
