Well, I'm across the ditch in New Zealand and working in a rental/sale store for the past five years. We get asked if we have Blu-ray maybe twice a month at the most, and sell one or two a month. Its a non-event here, although some of the other shops swear they rent them constantly. I call bullshit.

I remember when it was the fad to color the inside ring of your CDs with a Sharpie to make them sound "warmer." The record store I worked in had markers for sale by the register to take advantage of this.

Did it work?

Depended on how susceptible you were to the power of suggestion.

There were (and are) a host of issues with digital and the best analog set-ups will still sound more like the real thing, but the fundamental problem was always the sampling and bit rates. If you go back to issues of The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society from the late '70s and early '80s, you'll find a plethora of articles criticizing the 44k/16 standard the industry settled on at the time. The rate was insufficient to guarantee that overtones and ambient effects would be accurately reproduced. But the industry didn't care. The labels had been under a constant barrage of criticism as the pressing quality of LPS had been in a steady decline since the end of the '60s - lower quality vinyl, thinner pressing, poor QA/QC. The record companies saw the CD as the way out around these issues and didn't care that engineers kept telling them that the sampling rate was too low and would lead to error propagation in the algorithms used to interpolate between data points. High quality sound reproduction was the province of a few aficionados with high end systems while the majority of their customer base listening on cheap stereos were complaining about warps and all the ticks and pops. And so we got "perfect sound forever."

Just out of curiosity, which Criterion titles have DVD versions that are superior in certain ways to the Blu-ray version?

Off the top of my head, I know we have:
Double Life of Veronique (DVD has an extra essay in the booklet)
Man Who Fell to Earth (DVD comes with novel)
Last Emperor (TV version and some essays in booklet only available in the 4 disc set)

I'm pretty sure there are other Blu-rays that have trimmed down booklets, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

Fanny and Alexander's Blu-Ray was missing the director introductions. And I suppose you could count the new DVD edition of Howards End, considering the problems present on the Blu-Ray.

All of the Blu-rays lose the DVD menu screen, which is occasionally a bit of a shame.

The loss of the Rushmore menus made me particularly sad.

The BD of Monterey Pop is missing the vintage Jann Wenner "Rolling Stone" article, if we're being that picky.

Donald Richie's "biographical sketches" are missing from the BD Kagemusha booklet.
The original "Beauty and the Beast" story by Mme. Beaumont is missing from the BD booklet

I'd say the PQ quality on the Children of Paradise DVD is superior to the waxy DNR'd Blu-ray.

By my count, when including the the announced titles through January '13, we're at 1/3rd of the DVD collection also being on Blu-ray (as Spine #'s go, 229/644). That averages to 4.5 releases a month (50 months since the first BDs in 12/08).

Not bad in ~4 years of BD releases. 86/229 of the BDs are upgrades released after the DVD counterpart.

It's maybe a more helpful measure if you only count spines that didn't initially get Blu-ray releases (i.e. everything before 450, and about 50 titles between 450 and 534). That way, out of about 500 spines that could at some point have been upgraded, I count 80 so far that have been (about 16%, or 20 a year). At that rate, that's still 21 more years before they could upgrade everything.

Here's the breakdown:

Spines 1-449

85 have been upgraded.

55 DVD-only titles are OOP and unlikely to ever get re-issued (I did not include the BRD Trilogy in this count as it will eventually be re-issued)

So, 85/394 eligible titles are upgraded.

Spines 450-534 (534, L’enfance nue, last DVD-only release)

Of these 85:

32 were released on BD day-and-date with the DVD
1 has been subsequently upgraded (485, The Last Days of Disco)
52 remain DVD only

So, that's 447 (394+52+1) that were originally DVD only that are currently in print, with 86 having been upgraded.

86/447 = 19.2%

361 remain, though it is unlikely some will ever be upgraded.

I've been surprised by which titles that already exist in HD masters have not yet been upgraded to Blu. Is this purely a sales question?

Where's ...

L'avventura and L'Eclisse
The Dreyer box set
The Vanishing
Red Beard (please!)
Hiroshima mon amour
Fassbinders
Eyes without a Face
Bergman trilogy

and my most wanted:

A Canterbury Tale
Spirit of the Beehive

and La Strada!

Spirit of the Beehive is out on Blu-ray in Spain, with English subtitles.

The bad news is that it's definitely Region B (I've just checked).

I've been sorely tempted by the Spanish releases of Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur but I believe neither have extras, is that correct?

Aside from trailers for other releases on the same label, that's right. But I picked up both for less than £20 including delivery from Amazon.es the other week.

How are the transfers? Like Calvin, I've been tempted because they are inexpensive.

I recently sent a Mulvaney e-mail to ask if this was indeed going to become available again. The reply was that it was OOP because they lost the rights...

I believe that if you take the time to browse through Criterion's Hulu offerings you'll find many more than that available. Unfortunately they've made that much more difficult to parse online.

This was Mulvaney's reply to me right after the set was taken out-of-print:

Both Veronika Voss and Marriage of Maria Braun were recently added to Criterion's Hulu channel, while Lola (along with the other two) has been shown with Janus logos since the original releases were discontinued. There has been a change in rights (due to Wellspring's dissolution), but it's safe to say that these films will be reappearing.

Is El Sur Blu, too? I mighty jump for those. Though isn't it inevitable that Spirit will be released by CC in Blu?

Probably. They also have rights to El Sur (currently streaming on their Hulu channel), if you're patient enough to wait.