The Cat O' Nine Tails may represent Blue Underground's finest release yet from a purely visual perspective.

There's a very interesting post on the Hometheaterforum in the "A few words about HOWARDS END" thread started by Robert Harris. It's post #90 in page 3 of the thread, written by one Adam_S, an assistant film editor who works in the industry. While it's referring to some digital noise issues that some folks are reporting with the Blu-ray of HE and not the Blue underground titles mentioned here, I think what he writes re: certain scanners being unable to properly handle film grain might be applicable to the titles being debated here. Here are some relevant quotes from his post, you can read the full thing over at HTF:

Quote:
Adam_S:"I was at the academy last summer for their 'film formats through the ages' night which showed a ton of clips from a variety of films, mostly in large format. Some were digitally restored presentations of 70mm films, most were 70mm film. One in particular looked horrid blown up on that wonderful Samuel Goldwyn screen (and I've seen it in 70mm and know what its grain looks like, it wasn't grainy it was noisy and digital). There were a handful of DPs as part of a panel afterwards, and one made an aside comment that one clip looked particularly atrocious tonight, and shouldn't because the people who were so proud of their image hadn't properly harvested it to begin with, they had got an image that they thought represented film grain but was actually like a pulsing parameceum of digital noise... And he then said there were certain image harvest machines he simply wouldn't use because they'd produce an image that looked to most people like a beautiful 2k harvest, but when he looked at it all he saw was a "digital floor," not film grain at all, a digital floor... The image was pulled, they looked at it, thought they were seeing film grain and didn't look closer... and since their harvest was calibrated to the digital noise rather than to the grain of the film, everything after that would be off in small but to some people significant ways. So since film grain is already hard to encode think how much harder it is to encode unfocused film grain that looks like a watery layer of digital noise interfering with the grain. The codec has issues with such a complex random structure, and compensates by introducing additional artifacting."
In other words, it might not be "DNR and re-graining" at all, but a scanner that doesn't handle film grain correctly, and the resulting digital noise causing nasty artifacting during the encode stage. This makes more sense to me than Lustig paying to de-grain then re-grain an image, and would help explain why the "grain" looks so digital.