I could agree that your manual correction is good enough, as the HDTV image here is a bit cold, and I agree about contrast and brightness levels; but it could not qualify as restoration, but only as fanedit... don't get me wrong, I admire your efforts here and in several other threads (like Robocop)... but it seems that a *proper* fan restoration (as proper could be a fan restoration, by the way...) should take a reference when trying to do a color correction.

I mean, maybe the laserdisc colors are not the same of what we all saw in the theaters, but at least it could be called *a* reference; do you agree? I'm curious myself to see if, using HDTV luma and LD chroma results will be similar to what you have done.

I was tempted myself to use a color grading for "The Matrix" not entirely based on DVD as reference, but I decided to stick with DVD as color reference; now the BD has colors really really close to DVD and, even if I personally prefer my previous settings in some instances, I think the whole color grading should be mantained as closely to the reference as possible (even if I know it's cleary impossible).

This is, of course, only my personal opinion - I'm still trying to find a clear definition of what a fan edit, restoration, preservation are, and nothing seems to be "written in the stone" (^^,) and you deserve the right to make your own color correction, but I strongly advice to NOT use your german HDTV capture...

The 1080i english HDTV is way better than the 720p german; take a look at these screenshots:

german 720p (yours, as you posted, untouched)

1080i english (VLC -> MSPaint -> resize 50% -> resize 73%, to match your picture)

the 1080i have more details, is less cropped, and colors are slightly different... it's AR is around 1.80:1, while the BD is 16:9 (1.77777...:1), so is closer to the theatrical AR of 1.85:1 (not so much, indeed...)