Animation Source Forums

The last time I checked, when I purchased Balto III in HD on iTunes, the first and second films were not in HD.

Edit: Interesting. It appears that Balto 1 is now available in HD. If I wasn't broke I would buy the HD version.

First of all, sorry for my bad English, and for the topic bump too,but I don't think there is a much gap beetwen the last post and mine.
Balto is also available in HD (1080P) on XBOX VIDEO. (12,99$) and for rental (4.49$) in HD quality.
But (IMO), I think it's not true HD,maybe it's just upscaled so it can fit on HDTV's.

I went ahead and purchased the movie from iTunes ans took a few screenshots.

Samples:
https://imgur.com/Byeyz6C,o8yVuch,HBUHZjk,b0s5BBu#0

Nice,Mighty. It definetly looks better than the DVD version, not too much, but a bit better.
On a different note, i wanted to get the movie from Itunes too, but it seems its not available in my country.

It looks almost identical to my DVD.

It's clearer than the DVD, but I'm pretty sure this is just an upscaled version of the film. In order for it to be truly in HD, the film would have to undergo a restoration process to clean up imperfections. Of course, this being from iTunes, the file that you pay for is around 3GB in size, which is small. Anything that you watch, stream or purchase online is going to be compressed to some degree.

To be honest, this HD version of the film looks nearly identical (although the iTunes version is technically better) to the 1080i version that Steet posted about a few years back. I wasn't able to download all of it before it was taken down, but that's what I used to create the current screenshots on Balto Source.

Examples:
/sites_co ... /79937.jpg
/sites_co ... /80040.jpg
/sites_co ... /80059.jpg
/sites_co ... /80075.jpg

None of these really look like HD though, they have upscale artefacts and are a bit blurry. I hope they do a real HD / Bluray version someday.

I'd totally agree with. But maybe there will someday. They released An American Tail on Bluray like a year ago. So that gives us hope.

Wow, didn't know about this!

Yeah, that gives some hope. Maybe the reason they're making the DVD look so bland, is because they have a wonderful Bluray with a gorgeous cover in mind! (so people would buy the beautiful Bluray which costs more money!)
One can dream...

That would be cool if they were purposely doing that.

To be honest, I doubt it's the reason... Universal never really knew what to do with their animated properties, anyway.

If there was to ever a true blu-ray release, I would defiantly buy it. But I doubt that Universal would ever go through the trouble of making a blu-ray release, unfortunately.