52-53 Yojimbo / Sanjuro: Two Samurai Films by Akira Kurosawa

[ChunkyLover]

With Eureka, their primary authoring-house of choice, IBF-HD, had the habit of mastering their gamma low (think of it similar to Kino Lorber's early BD discs) on early BDs. There is also the fact that a lot of older Japanese HD masters tended to be mastered at "PC levels" which can create an "elevated" look if not presented properly.

[tenia]

Drucker, I guess I meant to say that MoC was given the low-contrast masters and told by the Japanese studios that they reflected the authentic look of the originals. Then MoC repeated that as justification for not tinkering with the masters.

This is not mutually exclusive to Criterion regularly pushing the contrast to a quite video level, which they definitely were doing. However, it might very well be that Eureka's releases were on some kind of extreme opposite.