i just had an anamorphic film transfer done by my normal lab in san francisco, and it looks really horrible. it was transferred on a bosch quadra (which does not seem to be people's machine of choice, but it usually serves my purposes okay.)
it looks very "digitized" - i think it has something to do with the the compressed image's vertical height being somehow electronically squashed in the machine somewhere to give a normally proportioned, letterboxed image. diagonal lines look absurdly bad, as do most hard edges.
i've transferred anamorphic stuff at this lab previously, and it looked "okay", but i did notice this problem before to a lesser degree, in wide shots. closeups with the background kicked out of focus are fine.
there are a few differences about this footage - the shoot was entirely exterior, mostly wide shots, mid day, pretty contrasty, deeply focused, and shot on 5248 to boot. other stuff i've transferred was either 5293 or 5277, and was pretty low key.
anybody else had weird problems with anamorphic transfers?
note that the problems were visible on the monitor at the lab (not routed through a deck), and when we viewed the footage flat (no compression to 2:35), the problem was gone. i know the heinous NTSC signal is gonna be responsible for some of this problem, but shouldn't i be able to get better than this???
help?