It was definitely the Meridian version, different to the cover I posted and it said "Meridian". Interesting comparison, not sure I would notice it on our old CRT television (as I pointed out previously). Apart from it looking perfectly presentable (clean and sharp), nothing jumped out at me about the quality, and I probably wouldn't have even thought about it if it was a recent release. Did they change color balance, brightness, saturation etc.?
All of those, plus they stretched the image in the anamorphic conversion to reduce cropping. The most noticeable things are edge enhancement and contrast fiddling, plus there's a sort of "smoothing" evident on flat surfaces like faces. The review said that they lost detail by reducing the bit rate, but I suspect that's in comparison to the Anchor Bay release, which I haven't seen. I know that towards the end of CRT production there were some pretty fancy sets around, including a few that worked with HD inputs, but I doubt there are many that would show a big difference between the three versions.
Incidentally, while faffing about on ebay I accidentally bid on an Anchor Bay release (I'm the only bidder) so I may have a copy soon. I shan't be sorry if I get outbid.
"a sort of "smoothing" evident on flat surfaces like faces"
I've only seen that sort of thing on big flat screens (such as my brother's 55"), I assumed it was 'up sampled' streaming 1080p content, whatever it looks creepy AF.
Some modern televisions upscale really well, others don't. All of them benefit from having the electronic image improvements turned off, with the possible exception of watching fast moving sport where various settings can reduce blur. For normal viewing, the worst culprit is motion interpolation which produces the "soap opera effect". It's designed to bring material with one refresh rate up to the native refresh rate of the TV to avoid blur and give you a "better" picture. If your film is 24 fps and your TV's native frequency is 60 Hz (and many are 120 Hz) then motion interpolation will buffer the film and calculate 'intermediate' frames which are interpolated. The effect is horrible. I watched the Third Man at my Brother's house (he's a chap who plugs things in, turns them on and that's it) and it was like watching a live video feed: really weird and unsettling. It's called different things depending on who makes the TV - trumotion, clearframe etc.
In hindsight, there was an odd disconnect between the 'eye-candy' photography (which I had assumed was a cinéma du look thing), and the noirish plot.
Yeah, I think the Cinema du Look is a grand term for a very small stylistic twist. Style as a way of life and an expression of independence is as old as the hills. Sticking it into movies with smart camera work, sharp lighting, and a few cleverly placed arty-objects is a bit thin as a means of creating a whole genre. That said, the film is a pretty good representation of a moment in time, and not bad in its own right.
...also, Bollocks, I won the auction. So now I have 3 versions of Diva.
Get another and you'll have Il Divo.
Oh, Har de har!
Yes, I could buy the blu ray (no English subs) and improve my terrible French so that I don't need subtitles. That would give me something to do while I self-isolate here in leafy Sussex. The world's my oyster.
There's probably some Diva-fanboy site that would appreciate a frame-by-frame analysis of the difference between versions. Make yourself useful while you're spared...