As it turns out, though, my fears prove entirely unfounded. For as with the only other entirely successful Warners' Blu-ray I've seen, The Prestige, the Sweeney Todd picture quality is absolutely superb from pretty much start to finish.

I say 'pretty much' because actually the very first shot of the film is curiously crap; as Todd's boat emerges Nosferatu-like from a bank of fog, there's a really unpleasant amount of dot crawl noise to be seen in the swirling mist. Yikes.

Thankfully this noise has completely vanished a moment later as the action shifts to the streets of London, leaving me instead staring agog at one of the very best Blu-ray picture transfers I've clapped eyes on.

There's so much good stuff going on that it's difficult to know where to start. Hmm. Well, as I've already mentioned that they were an area of concern before I started actually watching this transfer, I might as well begin with the black levels.

First of all, they're profoundly deep, avoiding for 99.9% of the time the flat, grey, crushed look I've seen with numerous previous Warner releases. Night time scenes thus look like night time scenes, rather than like they're taking place in some weird grey fog.

There's also not a single trace I could detect of the sort of colour banding in dark areas that I've seen on previous Warner titles, nor any sign of grain or dot crawl noise.

The near-perfection of the Sweeney Todd dark scenes has a knock-on benefit too, in that it allows the Blu-ray to reproduce to perfection the beautifully stylised lighting and stark, nearly black and white photographic techniques the film employs.

For instance, as Todd's whitened face paces around his perennially dark studio, the combination of light and dark is delivered with a dynamism and tonal accuracy that's really quite - dare I say - beautiful.

Yet another string to the Sweeney Todd Blu-ray's bow is its sharpness. You can make out every blood vessel on Timothy Spall's face, every individual bit of stubble on the face of Judge Turpin as he arrives for his fateful shave, and every weave in all the lovingly recreated Victorian outfits.

What's more, this sharpness pays terrific dividends with the film's exterior shots around London, giving them a sense of depth and detail that borders on the poetic at times.

Just occasionally the sharpness is almost too acute, in that you suddenly become aware momentarily during exterior scenes of the fact that the actors are being superimposed over a special effect backdrop. But these moments are very rare, and in any case can hardly be counted as a reason to diss the Blu-ray transfer.

The last reason to love the image quality of the Sweeney Todd Blu-ray is its superb colouration. The actually quite tricky grey-based colour palette the film uses is presented with what look to me like pitch-perfect tones. And the red hue of the copious - and I mean copious - amounts of blood spurting, dripping and trickling across the screen is allowed to dominate the image to just the right extent, too.

So are there any things about the Sweeney Todd Blu-ray's pictures that I don't like? Well, if you pushed me I might say that the film's occasional brightly coloured memory and fantasy scenes, such as the ball where Todd's wife is seduced by Judge Turpin, can look a bit soft. I realise these scenes were shot slightly soft, but the transfer seems to exaggerate this a touch more than I'd like.

The only other thing is that while black levels are generally excellent, one or two mid-dark (rather than very dark) scenes do look a touch greyed over and noisy for no obvious reason. Check out the fleeting shots of Todd's daughter in the chest in his room to see what I mean.

But I have no intention of finishing this picture quality section on a bum note. For the bottom line is that Warners has done a first rate job with what could have been a really quite tricky image transfer. In fact, I'd describe it as 'bleedin' brilliant' (chortle) if a sodding critic hadn't already got a similar pun slapped all over the Blu-ray's front cover. Damn you, Daily Mail!

How much you 'dig' this soundtrack, though, depends to a large extent on how much you like Sondheim's music. This is because while the soundmix does a nice job of transporting the score into the surround sound domain, that's pretty much all it does. There's precious little going on in terms of ambient effects and little if any attempt is made to produce a sense of a Victorian London going about its grubby business while Todd goes about his bloody business.

But then, to be fair, if Tim Burton and his crew had decided to litter the film with too many ambient noises, Sondheim fans would probably have moaned that this was detracting from the music. And as any fan of the stage musical will doubtless tell you ad nauseam: Sweeney Todd is all about the music.

This music is presented with great clarity, especially with the TrueHD mix, and without a trace of hiss or other interference. And as I suggested earlier, it's been reasonably well converted into surround sound so that you're immersed in it arguably more than you would be at a West End theatre. The soundtrack really opens up during the film's three or four big musical climaxes too, especially, again, if you're lucky enough to have the kit necessary to listen to the Dolby TrueHD mix.

Given that I'm willing to accept the argument that too many ambient effects would have detracted from the presentation of Sondheim's score and given that the film does not, by its nature, feature any explosions or gunshots for my home cinema system to get it's tweeters into, my only real complaint about the soundtrack is that I personally wouldn't have minded the rear channel being used more aggressively. But that probably makes me some sort of musical heathen, so I'll shut up and get on with checking out the extra features.

The full set of goodies is listed below and reviewed in depth on our 'leap off' page.

The only disappointment is that there's no commentary track on there, but I guess this is no great surprise given that neither director Tim Burton nor actor Johnny Depp are known for being 'chatty'.

Still, Helena Bonham Carter always seems to have plenty to say for herself in a reasonably entertaining fashion, so it's a shame she at least couldn't be induced to blather over the film for a couple of hours. Mind you, given the candour with which she talks about domestic life with Tim Burton (the father of her children) in the disc's opening documentary, it's quite possible that Burton thought it safest not to let her within a million miles of a 'commentary booth' for fear of too much of his notoriously well-kept private life getting laid bare! Anyway, here's that list...

1. Burton + Depp + Carter = Todd documentary.
2. Sweeney Todd is Alive: The Real History of the Demon Barber documentary.
3. Musical Mayhem: Sondheim's Sweeney Todd documentary.
4. Sweeney's London - tour of the locations of Todd's crimes
5. Grand Guignol: A Theatrical Tradition documentary
6. Designs for a Demon Barber documentary
7. A bloody business - featurette exploring the throat-slitting special effects!
8. The Making of Sweeney Todd - HBO First Look promotional documentary
9. London Press Conference - footage from the cast at a press conference
10. Razor's Refrain - stills set to score
11. Photo gallery - 52 stills.

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

The pop up menus are essentially the same as the up-front menus, meanwhile, with the only thing particularly likeable about the presentation being the way the extra features are described on the menu screen using the verbal style of a Victorian show poster.