Indeed. 4K transfers should be technically superior, in terms of detail retention and consistency of performance, every time.

But that’s not what films shot in the 1970s were designed for - even TV and home video would have been a distant afterthought. It was all about rendering the best possible image on those theatrical prints, and all the creative decisions in the filmmaking process had that firmly set as their end goal.

4K (and, to be fair, Blu-ray) are fantastic at wringing visual information out of archival film materials - it’s among their chief selling points - but they’re aimed at achieving a much different purpose than the one those materials were created for. Hence my concern about claims of ‘original intent’, which is always a dicey issue with this technology.