There was absolutely nothing technically wrong with either The 'burbs or Sisters. The former was a James White special - in other words, Arrow was able to control every stage of the process from scan to restoration - and the latter was sourced from Criterion's master, with all that that implies in terms of their own typically sky-high standards. In other words, I can say with total certainty (for The 'burbs) and high probability (for Sisters) that they look exactly as they were supposed to look.
Basically, if people didn't like how those BDs looked, their beef is with the original cinematographers and/or the manufacturers of the film stocks.
It's the same with White of the Eye, a BD that some numpty gave 3/10 for "picture quality" despite the fact that Arrow's restoration was sourced from a scan of the original camera negative (via an ArriScan, which is the state of the current art, largely because it doesn't introduce any noise or other visible glitches as a by-product of the scanning process). As it happens, I saw the film on its brief theatrical release and vividly remember the ultra-thick grain, high contrast and blown-out highlights of the flashback sequences, which were so marked that I originally assumed they'd been shot on something like Super 8 film! And you'd have thought that the detailed explanation in the booklet as well as an extra that presented the flashback footage before the bleach-bypass treatment had been applied would have made it clear beyond any possible doubt that those sequences were supposed to look like that - but it seems not.
The basic problem is that some people are so obsessed with the notion that "high definition" means "a pristinely crystal-clear image" that they can't get their heads around the fact that some films have always looked rather different from their conception of what's "ideal". But I'm afraid that's just tough.
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