Looks great. No complaints.
A Delicate Balance (1973, Kino)
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Author Archives: Nick
Good Morning (Criterion)
Weird added grain. It’s very prominent, but it floats on top of the image, as if the image was de-grained, restored to death, and then re-grained. In motion it looks very smeary.
The “grain” here is divorced from the picture and slides away:
Sometimes the dissolving grain moves at a slower frame rate:
(Revised 12-9-25.)
The Mikado (1939, Criterion)
According to the booklet, Criterion applied DVNR for grain reduction and they did their typical hiss reduction. Regrettable, but their work doesn’t have distracting repairs and looks natural overall.
1926 Promo
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
I Was Born, But… (Criterion)
Dammit, another upscale from Criterion! They are inconsistent in publishing bonus features and alternate versions in HD, and they never state on the box when they upscale. I even checked Blu-ray.com and DVDBeaver before buying (both said 1080p).
Screenshots make it look ok, but in motion, the aliased deinterlacing and DVD-era artifacting is obvious:
The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.
A Straightforward Boy
Restoration work is horrible:
Frozen temporal cloning looks terrible in motion. The pause in this video clip is due to the broken pulldown, not an error on my end:
Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA (Eureka)
Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.
The Silent Star (1960)
I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.
Signals (1970)
Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:
Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?
General interpolation and misalignment:
In the Dust of the Stars (1976)
There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.
Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…
Sloppy repairs are few, but present:
Love 2002 (1972)
Very rough, but natural.
Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.
The Robot (1968)
The best looking film in the set.
Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.
And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?
EDIT 11/17/25 – I just got the Deaf Crocodile release and did a quick spot check. Signals actually looks like 70mm this time, as opposed to Eureka’s grainy 2.35:1. In the Dust of the Stars is the same bad restoration. Grain is poor, looking like video noise. De-graining is frequent.