If I’m one of the rights-holders for any of the “great old movies,” do I spring for the time-consuming and more expensive task of restoring my great old movie or opt for the easy way out by telecineing a faded piece of film, complete with whatever blemishes it contains, and hope that a quick and dirty clean-up process makes things “good enough?” Even the easy method can be painstaking and time consuming.

As a purist who gets to see just how good the Sound of Music, Bladerunner, or Baraka looks sourced at high resolution and then cleaned up properly, I say it’s worth the wait. If the effort is going to be lackluster at best and they’re *still* dragging their feet on releasing them, then shame on them.

Warner has done a better job than any other (they do have the biggest catalogue)–of the 50 or so HD DVD titles I have, about 40 are Warner titles and they include Casablanca, The Searchers, Bullitt, Grand Prix, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), The Adventures of Robin Hood, 2001–A Space Odyssey–though I still await Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, North By Northwest, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief (I’m a bit of a Hitchcock fan, as you might have guessed) and many more with some impatience (in “blu”, of course, now the “war” is over).

The “big” catalogue titles will come–but the more obscure ones took over a decade to come to DVD (still no African Queen, for example–and that is simply criminal), so it will take time. Meanwhile, I’m sure the “Chucky” series will have had double releases in HDM before we see Bogie and Hepburn in SD, never mind Blu-ray.