SilverWook said:

One can hardly blame Criterion for doing non anamorphic releases in the early days of the DVD format. Took a while for even the major studios to realize simply porting existing LD masters over to a new digital format was not going to cut it. All except Lucasfilm of course. ;)

Disney held out for a while, but practically all of my other early DVDs were Anamorphic.

I think the reason a lot of Criterion DVDs weren't anamorphic was that they were reusing LaserDisc masters instead of doing new ones for DVD.

zombie84 said:

The Brazil DVD was bad?

walkingdork said:

What specifically didn't you like about Brazil or Time Bandits, xhonzi?

Picture quality is mega crap. Sound (Stereo) is adequate, but it's nothing special.

The special features are nice. But do people want Criterion to handle a Star Wars release so it can have nice special features? Or so the "picture and sound" can be restored and presented at their best?

zombie84 said:

Their innovations in the LD era and continuing efforts in the DVD era helped create the home video standards we now have.

Fair enough. I have no disagreement here. Their LD work was extensive. It seems it took them a long time to produce DVD quality DVDs...

I just don't know of any Criterion DVDs that are 'reference' quality when it comes to A/V. I only have 4 of them (two Terry Gilliams, and two Wes Andersons). The first two have crap A/V, and the other two are "pretty good" but nothing that would make me say, "Holy Crap! Get these guys to do all of my movies!"

It just seems to me that people continued to go nuts over Criterion stuff on DVD merely due to what they did for LD. Even when their DVD stuff was sub par.

What BDs of theirs have great A/V?