Sony announced a new line of "Mastered in 4K" Blu-rays a few months ago. In short, they took a bunch of movies and created new 4K digital masters of them. They took those masters and carefully crunched them down to create new Blu-ray transfers of everything.

This resulted in discs that are not only (allegedly) better-looking than the previous Blu-rays, but are specifically optimized for up-converted viewing on new Ultra HD "4K" TVs. In addition to playing with the pixels so that they'll look better after upconversion, they've redone the color profile on these to take advantage of color gamut that only 4KTVs can display. These discs, like their Superbit DVD ancestors (more on them in a bit), lack any special features whatsoever.

The new "Mastered in 4K" Blu-ray of Ghostbusters ($15) is a vast improvement over its predecessor. That still doesn't make it a blind or instant buy.

From the 2013 "Mastered in 4K" Blu-ray, aka "how good the 2009 disc should have looked"

SuperBit: History and Legacy

In the heyday of DVD, Sony released a line of discs aimed at the true audio/videophile called Superbit. These DVDs ditched all extras (at first) to pack as much AV data on the disc as possible, providing a much higher bitrate (hence Superbit) as compared to DVDs that crammed a bunch of other stuff on the disc. The physical cases were also super-slim (at least at first), which was a shelf space saver for retailers and consumers.

Later, "Superbit Deluxe" releases added extras on a separate disc. Superbit used to be the only way to get movies like Panic Room, Closer, Snatch, and others. Very few Deluxe discs (Bridge on the River Kwai, a Charlie's Angels double-feature set) were released before Superbit was completely abandoned as a sub-brand.

The best things to result from Superbit are modern Blu-ray releases that split disc space-hungry extras to separate discs (see last year's Prometheus, for example) in the interest of maintaining better bitrate. The Superbit discs all had both Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 surround audio tracks, which nudged audio standards forward...even though studios still release Blu-rays with non-Lossless tracks (to their shame and condemnation). I'd like to think that the super-slim physical cases influenced the space-saving direction on packaging found in many Blu-ray releases: slimpack cases or multi-disc sets the size of a paperback novella replacing enormous dictionary-width boxes.

For Reference

I watched portions of both discs on three different displays:

55" 1920x1080 Samsung TV
27" 2560x1440 Apple Thunderbolt Display
15" 2880x1800 Apple Retina MacBook Pro built-in display

In addition to the prime sequences of the movie that I watched and took screengrabs from, I skimmed much more of the 4K disc in general to ensure consistency. This is as scientific a process as I had time to apply to this, but I would challenge someone to find fault with any of the below.

I have watched a very well-preserved 35mm collector's print of the movie within the last five years, and have suffered the various awful transfers of it on cable and DVD.

I have not looked at any of the other "Mastered in 4K" Blu-rays released this week. I got Ghostbusters from Amazon. To my knowledge, they didn't send anyone review discs for these, which is why you haven't seen anyone write about them this week.

A prominent hat tip goes to my friend Drew McWeeny, who first tipped me off to the abhorrent original Blu-ray, which I eventually purchased secondhand and suffered through once. I share the opinions he lists toward the end of the linked piece.

General Assessment

Ghostbusters has always been mistreated on home video, with the most egregious abuse coming from the pan-and-scan-heavy TV cut made for tube TVs.

The new "Mastered in 4K" transfer is far and away the best that Ghostbusters has looked in HD, and I recommend it for serious fans of the movie (with provisos in the Conclusion), whereas I couldn't do the same in good conscience for the 2009 disc.

The image is less noisy, while still effectively simulating era- and stock-appropriate grain. The contrast is not blown out, which was particularly glaring in the 2009 release, especially during the last 20 minutes of the movie. What follows includes select comparison stills pulled from both discs*, brief commentary on the visual differences seen in each set of images, and something I uncovered while poking around the directory structure of the 2009 and 2013 versions.

Comparisons

Note radically less noise, even contrast, and more vibrant color in the second grab (from the "4K" disc). The color temperature isn't as cool either. Look at the lampshades and fleshtones. Good god, look at the difference in the floor!

2009 Blu-ray