Frodo can't believe how mediocre the LOTR Blu-ray picture looks.

The Lord of the Rings Blu-ray discs should be an achievement for the ages.  Combine one of the most impressive visual movies with one of the most impressive, high definition visual physical media ever created, and the results should be phenomenal.  The DVDs themselves looked great, so the Blu-ray should look amazing, right?  Well, if you’re CrunchGear, the answer is… not so much.

A side-by-side comparison of the Blu-ray and televised HD versions of the movie reveal some pretty telling differences.  According to the writer of the article, anyway.  The concensus is somehow, someone messed up the encoding and gave the world an inferior copy of Lord of the Rings versus the broadcast HD, which is just kind of astounding.  Looking at the images presented over at AVS Forum, and I can believe it.

There’s no way the Blu-ray version shouldn’t be significantly better than the HD broadcast version.  Yet here they are, side by side, and if anything the broadcast version looks a little better thanks to not being as overly-processed.  On some things the Blu-ray is better (the title, background definition), but on the important things, it’s a push at best.  Sad, really.