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xhonzi said:
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!"
This seems very strange to me. I have never had a Criterion DVD that wasn't reference quality. That is what they are known for.
I will conceed, however, that they didn't get their act together until around 2001 or 2002. Their transfers before this sometimes used material that by todays standards was not so impressive, and their early discs sometimes re-pressed their Laserdisc releases. This was standard practice for everyone mind you, as DVD in general from before 2001 or so is poor by todays standards, from the special features to the re-used LD masters, to non-anamorphic presentations of release-print sources, to EE and other problems that encoders struggled with. There were few releases that hold up today, which is why every company re-released their early DVDs in new editions--including Criterion starting in 2006.
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.
Rather the opposite. No one had LD players, so most people don't know Criterion LDs. Criterion is known for doing custom restorations on all their releases.
I guess you have just had bad luck. I would encourage you to give them a second chance. They are the absolute best company in home video history as far as quality control goes, in my opinion, up there with Warners.