Criterion update

[Grubert]

The staff from Sound and Vision magazine are helping the Criterion studio design and build their new screening room. There's a nice article here.

The 23-year-old company has yet to jump into high-def, by the way, shunning both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD for standard DVDs. "We're waiting for the formats to figure themselves out," says Lee. "If we wind up liking Blu-ray but Casablanca is only on HD DVD, we don't want people to have to choose. And we also don't want to confuse them by siding with one format over the other, because it's not our place to decide. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray have merit to us, and both look really good."

Criterion, though, is all for taking the resolution of its releases to the next level. "We're ready to go," says Lee. "We've mastered in high-definition for years now. We just have to take the tapes and compress them in an HD codec. We did a Blu-ray test of one of our titles, and we're really happy with the results."