Wow, the real (rhs) images have so much more of an "emotional" appeal. Somehow the middle images, while I admire the tech, really don't add much to the black and white, and they might even take something away. They seem much too tentative, washed out, averaged. I would argue that in general, they're the worst out of the three.
That's a problem with this specific architecture. If it's not sure what color something is, it goes with an average of all the colors. When a brighter color would be more realistic, even if the exact shade is wrong. Some people have suggested ways of fixing this above.
But just the fact it guesses the right colors at all is really cool. Previous automatic colorizations I've seen were very very crappy or required lots of human input. Or both.
And while these colorized photos do look a bit dull, I like them better than black and white. Something about black and white photography makes it look fake to my brain. It doesn't register the same way. Even really bad colorizations make images feel more real. I once saw very badly colorized video of WWI, and it was really fascinating. I actually felt like I was watching a real event that had actually happened. The same is true for these images.
