The DVD referenced below was a beautiful restoration drawn from the best available footage. Unfortunately, about 25% of the footage was, at the time it was made (early 2000s) thought to be completely lost. In 2008 a 16mm version of what is thought to be pretty much the whole film was found in Argentina. In the earlier DVD, the missing bits had been described in text plates. Now they could be reinserted. But the 16mm content was a transfer, made in the early 1970s, of a highly degraded nitrate version of the film, so despite their best attempts at restoration, the quality differences are huge. What follows are two frames showing much the same content which were one second apart on this Blu-ray. The first is part of the new reconstruction, taken from the 16mm treasure. The second is the matching part restored from better quality source film. Surprisingly, the transition from one to the other is far less jarring than you might think.

The DVD was the restored version, similar to those offered in the US by Kino (although in the US it was NTSC rather than PAL).

At the top of each comparison is the full frame (suitably shrunk down) used in the comparison, with a 250 pixel wide detail from the frame underneath. The left side is from the PAL DVD. The image was captured digitally from the disc, scaled up from its native 720 by 576 pixel resolution to 768 by 576 (to present in the correct aspect ratio) by the application. I then scaled it, in order for it to be comparable to the Blu-ray version, to 1,440 by 1,080 pixels.

The detail is from that last scaled version, and has not been rescaled again. The right side is from the Australian Blu-ray. This has not been scaled at all. Different applications were used to capture the two frames, so some caution should be exercised in judging colour and brightness.

For visitors from NTSC lands, generally the PAL DVD is just a touch sharper than the NTSC DVD.

Well, you could have blown me down with a feather, as I would like to think I remember my Grandfather saying. If I'd had to guess, I would have said that there was not much difference between the two, but look at this. The Blu-ray is cleaner, with visibly finer detail. Grain hasn't gone, but what looked like grain on the DVD now seems to be compression artefacts:

Well, that wasn't a fluke. This frame is similar: the grain is still there but much, much finer. There isn't a lot more detail revealed, but it is delivered more smoothly and naturally than the DVD:

Freed from the course grain, the edges seem sharper, her eyes seem more piercing, her expression very slightly more intent:

The valves shown above seem smoother and more realistic in the Blu-ray. But I also wanted to look at the dials in the top half of the frame. As we can see, in the Blu-ray the text on their faces is almost readable, and far less so for the DVD version:

Here, in addition to the Father being cleaner and more precisely defined by the Blu-ray, we can see that the wall behind him has a kind of speckled finish, which is largely washed out in the DVD version: