The slightly-crushed blacks are certainly an improvement over the notably-elevated blacks. I wouldn't be surprised if they could have manipulated the gamma values just a bit more to lose less shadow detail and still get those solid dark areas - but hey, that's basically how the DP approved Grindhouse Releasing DVD handled shadow detail, too.
The release still looks a odd, though. It's
not DVNR, as there's still quite a bit of grain left intact, so I can only assume what I'm seeing is a side-effect from a different temporal process. Maybe film stabilization or scratch removal (and it may well have been on Rome's end, not Arrows).
Caps-A-Holic's 4th shot is the best example; there's a lot of
something in the sky, but it doesn't look anything like the sharp, random grain you find on other Arrow and Blue Underground Techniscope films. At first I thought it just might be poor compression, but the new release has more than double the bitrate, and that odd underlying texture - though better resolved - is still just as irregular as it was before.
Arrow did the right thing with this corrected BD50 version though, and now that I can see what they've done, I'm very much looking forward to having it.
