There appear to be mastering problems with the release, causing severe banding in dark colors. The darkest black found in company logos in the beginning of 00005.m2ts is #040607 and similar black level is used through the entire movie. The black bars (part of the 1920x1080 video stream) are entirely black #000000. The white level appears to be #FEFEFC, which is not perfect but close enough for me.
Here is a screen capture for reference: http://zi.fi/shots/ironsky-screencap.png
The darkest shade of space appears to be #050807 and the next level from that is considerably higher #080A08, making the banding highly visible. Also there is green tint (unless space should be greenish), either due to flawed color conversion or because of "artistic" film filters.
Perhaps someone responsible for the mastering could explain how did this happen? I do gather that the blu-ray release was rushed out due to Revolver's fast schedule but I'd like a technical explanation. Is the original rendered material in low bit depth (e.g. 8 bit sRGB) instead of some HDR format? I could understand banding occurring if 8 bit sRGB needs to undergo any gamma correction or other kinds of color filtering and conversion into YUV for H.264 compression.
I hope that the upcoming BD and DVD releases will have properly set full range black and white levels and sufficient bit depth to avoid any banding. If the original material is not good and cannot be fixed, additional noise could be added to hide the banding (yes, I hate noise too, but I hate banding even more).
