ADDITION: BFI - Region 'B' - Blu-ray (May 2015): Firstly, let's make some comments on the Spanish package reviewed HERE. It is 1080i and this BFI edition is 1080P. The UK bitrate is about 50% higher and it is slightly darker with better layered contrast. But while I didn't notice significant difference in the stills of The Floorwalker, I certainly did with The Rink (see below) and it makes me think that The Rink and Easy Street on the Divisa Spanish BD were not from the 2013 restoration. It now looks like 720 blown-up. The BFI transfer, on the other hand, is definitely superior - in a minor way in most films but dramatically with others. The times are slightly different because the Divisa is transferred at 25 fps and BFI at 23.976 fps. The BFI offers multiple scores (2 alternates per film) and each film has a commentary. The Divisa only has the Carl Davis scores (which are also as the default option on all the BFI Mutual films transfers).

NOTE: Michael J. Hayde (author of CHAPLIN'S VINTAGE YEAR: The History of the Mutual-Chaplin Specials) tells us in email: "You are correct that the transfers of THE RINK and EASY STREET are completely different on the BFI release than on the Divisa Spanish set. They are from completely different sources, and the only reason the older transfers for those two appear on the Spanish (and Italian) set is that the new transfers weren't ready yet. The new transfers do appear on the Flicker Alley set." (Thanks Michael!)

The 12 films have all been restored and the specifics of each restoration are outlined in a text screen before each film. As an example - this is the text before The Floorwalker ... which has been restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Lobster Films, from safety fine grain preserved at The Museum of Modern Art. Some fragments were added from a nitrate print preserved at Cinemateque Royale de Belgique. Intertitles have been reconstructed according to the original Mutual title cards and documents of the Library of Congress. The surviving elements come from two different negatives. Negative A was restored whenever possible whole negative B was used to reconstruct missing or severely damaged shots. Restoration work was carried out at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in 2013.

The above supports David Shepard's statements from late 2013: "On almost all of the films, we had multiple elements from both A and B negatives. There are differences between them. Almost everything we used was a first generation full aperture 35mm nitrate print. All were scanned at 2K, edited together with new reproduction 1916-1917 intertitle cards, and digitally restored and repaired on a Phoenix Revival system. (The new main titles are not reproductions and clearly identify the films as modern restorations). We used A negative sources unless a shot was obviously missing, incomplete or badly damaged, in which case we substituted the most similar shot from a B negative source. What we did not do is conflate the A and B versions to make a longer film than was originally released in either neg version."