I personally wasn't too impressed. Although the depth and blending looked great, something really is lacking that puts me off from watching it that way.
The DVDs of the colorized edition are very shoddy transfers.
The audio was re-recorded pretty well, IMHO. But the DVD transfer was rather feeble.
Hopes for a better quality Blu-ray?
I think a proper restoration would have to be done first for a good Blu Ray. The colorisation was not combined with a good restoration but done on top of questionable quality material. No proper stabilisation and clean up.
shareThe restorers claimed that they had to use a dupe negative as it was the only source available. They also claimed to have removed jitters, shakes and cracks. I wonder why the print still has some dirt and shakes. Perhaps the brand new negative was mishandled too!
I would just love it if Criterion or Arrow restores the original, uncut Black and White negative for a Blu-ray transfer.
Yes, I know about the duplicate negative. But what I see from the DVD is often shoddy work, lack of stabilisation and clean up. For example in a scene in the dungeon Madhubala seems to be primitively copied into the frame in the center for whatever reason. She floats around. I can't imagine this to be an original bad special effect. The film is jumping around all the time anyway. And is never really clean. Of course with Indian DVDs one can never be sure where a problem starts. Maybe they did not use the digital files but scanned again poorly a film out of the colorised version and added all the jumping there. It would be insanely stupid to do so, but who knows.
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