New York looks riotously colourful too during the pre-flood sequences. In fact, so vibrant is the colour palette during these early pre-cataclysm sequences that you kind of wish the ice age with its inevitable emphasis on boring old white could hold off for another century or two.

The transfer is extremely detailed too. The distance shots of twisters destroying Los Angeles look amazingly sharp, with every single window of every single devastated building clearly delineated.

As well as simply reminding you of how marvellous high definition’s detailing is, the sharpness of the picture really enables you to appreciate the quality of this film's special effects. For instance, the number of bits of debris you can make out spinning around in the twisters seems to go beyond the call of duty, but in doing so really helps the effects look much more believable on my large projection screen than they would otherwise.

The clarity and colour-richness of the picture also helps it deliver a phenomenal sense of depth and scale, making the cities look like, well, cities, and the enormous natural forces - twisters, tidal waves and, um, cloud formations - look, well, enormous.

The strengths we've just described make The Day After Tomorrow's disaster scenes veritable poster boys for what HD can bring to a big-screen movie experience. Especially as the MPEG-4 transfer displays no trace I could see of encoding artefacts. This is true even when the amount of motion the transfer is having to handle is prodigious, such as with the dazzling ‘tidal wave over New York’ sequence.

More good news comes from the fact that I didn't manage to spot a single blemish on the master - dirt, sparkle, lines, nothing.

For all its frequently majestic efforts, though, The Day After Tomorrow's picture quality isn't quite perfect. There's a slightly gritty 'digitised' look to some scenes that the very finest HD transfers seem to avoid. Also, the colour saturation that works so well for most of the time occasionally overcooks things a touch, leaving some skin-tones looking over-ripe, especially during tight close-ups.

A handful of scenes - such as those in the hospital Jack's wife works in - also look oddly softer and less ‘HD’ than others too.

But probably the single worst fault is the way some dark scenes look inexplicably flat and grey, losing the generally good black levels exhibited for the majority of the film's length.

Despite this little cluster of sporadic flaws, though, overall The Day After Tomorrow's Blu-ray delivers exactly the sort of big-spectacle extravaganza HD was born to reproduce.

In case you're not clear about this, though, you don’t need to have the decoding kit to handle DTS-HD Master Audio in order to hear anything from the disc; an 'ordinary', non-HD AV receiver will just 'see' the ordinary DTS 5.1 mix that’s actually also tucked away within the DTS-HD Master Audio matrix.

If you DO have the kit to handle the DTS-HD Master Audio mix, though, I strongly suggest you use it. For this mix is even more foundation-wreckingly impactful than the one on 30 Days Of Night.

Not surprisingly, the audio highlights take place during the numerous 'major disasters' - most notably the tidal wave over Manhattan, and the LA twisters. During both these sequences the amount of bass being forced through your subwoofer feels like it could well bring your own house down in sympathy with those in the film. Plus you can clearly hear individual bits of debris clattering and whooshing around your room with perfect speaker-to-speaker transitions.

Yet not a word of dialogue gets lost in these moments (not even the cheesy stuff) thanks to strong use of the centre channel. And the extent of the dynamic range - the difference between the highest trebles and lowest bass - is simply incredible.

The sheer scale of the soundstage is awe-inspiring too. For instance, while it's hard to know for sure what the vast Larsen B ice shelf breaking off sounded like in real life, for my money this DTS-HD Master Audio recreation has got to be along the right lines. Except the film mix is probably louder than the real thing!

I should say, though, that all of the above audio showboating is dependent, of course, on you having a set of speakers powerful enough to do the DTS-HD Master Audio track justice.

Stepping down to the normal DTS 5.1 mix is initially disappointing, with noticeably more compression at the bass end of the audio spectrum, and a little less precision and detail in the upper register. The soundstage isn't quite as flawlessly cohesive, either. But I only say all of this because I'm coming to the DTS mix straight after indulging myself in the DTS-HD Master Audio mix. Pitch this DTS 5.1 mix more fairly against other normal DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes, and it's actually quite outstanding.

For the record, the disc also carries Spanish and Italian DTS 5.1 mixes.

There aren't any 'making of' or thematically connected featurettes, at any rate. But on the upside there is the anticipated commentary track by director Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon (even though this isn't even mentioned on the disc's packaging!), and one or two of the other features are at least quite innovative, even if their actual content isn't especially gripping.

HOWEVER! The UK Blu-ray version of The Day After Tomorrow is shorn of a second commentary track that features on the US Blu-ray release. Featuring co-writers Jeffrey Nachmanoff and Ueli Steiger, plus editor David Brenner and production designer Barry Chusid, there's absolutely no reason other than laziness why this second commentary couldn't be added to the UK release of the film. Shame on you, Fox.

As if this wasn't bad enough, the Blu-ray release of The Day After Tomorrow also lacks a whole bunch of other features found on the DVD - yes, DVD - release. For instance, there's no sign of the DVD's featurette on the process of global warming; no sign of the cluster of featurettes focussing on the Pre-Production, Production and Post-production phases of the film; no sign of the Global Watch feature where you choose from a list of five types of weather conditions and have the disc then tell you examples of when devastating examples of each condition occurred; and no sign of the DVD's City Freeze feature, where you can click on eight cities around the world and see how a worldwide climate shift would affect them.

Honestly, it's enough to make you think that DVD is actually the 'next-gen'format, not Blu-ray!

Anyway, through gritted teeth, here's the full list of what you DO get:

* Feature-length commentary by Emmerich and Gordon
* Global Warming trivia track to accompany the movie
* A few deleted scenes with optional commentary track by director Roland Emmerich and Producer Mark Gordon
* Personal scene selection (where you can select specific scenes from the film and watch them in sequence)
* A Search Content facility
* 10 deleted scenes
* A 'Gold Zone' interactive game
* Two theatrical trailers.
* HD trailer for Fantastic 4: The Rise of the Silver Surfer
* Web links.

For a review of every feature on the disc, click here.

They drop down in the top left corner of the picture with a tidy, suitably scientific look, and present a main list of top-line options that call up various sub-options when you select them.

I do have a couple of complaints about these menus, though. First, the text they use is rather small - a potentially really aggravating problem if your TV isn't that huge. Second, their structure seems a bit inscrutable in places. For instance, as I suggested in my review of the extra features, I wouldn't really have expected to find a text-only trivia feature residing under the 'Commentaries' subhead, yet that's where it is.

The 'smallness' issue affects the scene selection option too. For while I like the way key stills from each chapter are stitched together to make a 'film strip' presentation of the chapters, the images are so small that it's really tricky to make out what some of them are showing on any TV smaller than 42in. Just as well I have a swanky projector to fall back on, eh readers? :-)

Some of the extras are interesting and innovative too, leaving us with a definitely superior Blu-ray release.

That said, even though The Day After Tomorrow's marks add up to the 80% usually deemed necessary to earn one of HD Wars' coveted Top Gun awards, the pathetic way Fox has failed to grant the UK Blu-ray so many of the extra features found on other editions of the film means this is one 80 per center that certainly is not going to get the unreserved recommendation represented by the Top Gun badge. So there.