Svevan wrote:Tribe wrote:The talk of "preempting" anyone who voiced some different opinion was just rubbing the wrong way.
My comment was in no way intended to preempt those who have "some different opinion." I was intending to preempt those who believe there is no right answer, and will merely justify the purchase of whichever product is more convenient/desirable to them. You stated that you "fail to see anything 'wrong'" with the grabs; I don't either. But do you at least see something "different?" The two digital presentations aren't identical, and that seems indisputable. I and many others think that Criterion manipulates their B&W films to have deeper darks and high contrast, giving them all a similar appearance (there are exceptions of course; it seems to be a more recent phenomenon, starting around spine 200 or so). It is possible that Criterion has a trump card and is darkening this image in key spots because they have privileged information that we don't: it is also possible that they want to make the image sharper by boosting blacks, putting the image in line with their "house style." I wanted only to preempt those who don't want to examine this question with neutral eyes. (MoC isn't in some sort of privileged position here; they just encoded Criterion's master without any digital touchups).
I think that people tend to support certain DVDs not because they have any real objective reasoning for preferring that digital presentation, but because they prefer the company, the extras, the cover art, or they're region-locked. This is a continuation of an argument about the colors in Tales of Hoffman, where certain people stated, as you did, that they "didn't see anything wrong" with the color-scheme, as if their individual perspective shorn of some historical context meant anything. For the record, I see nothing wrong with EITHER presentation (and more detailed analyses are forthcoming), but one must surely be "more correct" than the other.
This is a much better, if not more detailed, explanation than what I took your initial comment to mean. In your initial post about this you noted and claimed "ignoran[ce] of the film's original "look" so [you couldn't] compare the results without responding subjectively." So, I think it's clear you don't know what the original looked like and as a result you can't claim any particular privileged knowledge whether or not the CC version is inappropriate or not.
Having said that, sure, there are differences that are plainly visible in the caps...but that really doesn't mean much in the absence of some "smoking gun" regarding how the images are supposed to look in the first place. So in the absence of the same it does go back to a subjective sentiment regarding which one is correct. And you're right, my subjective view that there's "nothing wrong," as if my "individual perspective shorn of some historical context meant anything," is as subjective of your more detailed assessment.
And again, I do realize the commentary is well-intentioned...but I felt I had to call out the express "preemption" you emphasized in your original post.
Still, I think it's a vast minority of the population (perhaps not so much the minority of those who post here) who engage in the detailed "real objective reasoning for preferring [a] digital presentation" over another as grounds for preferring one version of a release over another. It's fine for what it is, but for those of us who feel little benefit arises out of such hair splitting it's sort of much ado about very slight variations and awfully subjective in the absence of that elusive "smoking gun."
Ultimately, and this has nothing to do with your post, I have been forever leery of judgment calls about the merits of one release over another ever since the ruckus raised in this Forum over the so-called reversed transposition scene in Jules and Jim, wherein so many posters (I don't believe many of those still post here) just went on and on as if Criterion had transgressed some ultimate moral code, only for it to later be disclosed that the transposition was in the original print.
Regardless, thanks for the explanation.