To be honest to these eyes the PT films have a more grouped feel to them than the OT films in terms of cinematography.

ESB was composed with more deliberate care and attention than ANH (which has more energetic whimsical framing).

ROTJ has some of both approaches and some beautiful shots but it's also got quite a few shots which seemed to have been just chucked together with very little care, attention, rough energy or wit.

In the PT if you compare scenes set in the same location or similar locations, like with like, they all feel the same. A senate scene, for example looks pretty much the same in TPM as it does in ROTS in a way that even X-Wing cockpit shots don't across all three OT films.

That hasn't as much to do with the cameras used but more to do with compositional ethos of the film makers involved.

The OT and TPM were both shot on film. But film is not like digital in that the cameras don't really matter; they don't determine what the picture looks like. With digital, the sensor is in the camera and this determines what the image will look like and the characteristics it has, but film cameras are really nothing but motors to run the film through. It is the lens and film stock that determines the image characteristics instead. So using the same cameras wouldn't mean anything except that they are shooting on film; TPM was shot on film and it didn't make a huge difference. Part of the reason is because each shot is digitally scanned and digitally altered with so much CG.

I agree with Bingo and Zombie.  If Lucas had wanted the prequels to start off somewhat matching the originals, he could have come a lot closer than he did.  Digital can be manipulated to have all sorts of looks - muted, saturated, washed-out, grey scale, warm, cool, grainy, etc.

Instead, he went with what he prefers - style over substance.  An over-saturated, surreal cartoon look and then he chose to try and force the originals to match the prequels.  As the technology advances, so do the releases of the originals.  That's why we get a new version of Star Wars every few years - Star Wars 4.3, Service Pack 2. 

I haven't seen this film, so maybe it looks better when watching it, but just looking at this screencap it has that cartoon look I was talking about.  The colors are weirdly saturated, the lighting seems strange, and people look like they aren't actually touching the ground.  It looks nothing like reality.

Compared to this picture from the original trilogy;

This seems much more real.  It has a.....there's a...it's.....I'm sorry, what were we talking about?

Anchorhead said:

and people look like they aren't actually touching the ground.  It looks nothing like reality.

People are actually touching the ground because the ground is real. :P

The extras aren't though.

Pfft.  Leia's not touching the ground either.

zombie84 said:

The extras aren't though.

Realism is missing on every Star Wars movie. Be it CGI or puppets.

That's nice, but Anchorhead said it looked like the people weren't touching the ground, and that's because 50% of the "people" in there are composites and CG characters.

Anchorhead posted two pictures?

Wouldn't have been much of a comparison if he only posted one.

There is no comparison.

Alexrd said:

Realism is missing on every Star Wars movie. Be it CGI or puppets.

I disagree.  The puppets were really there in the frame during filming, along with the background, buildings or foliage, etc. In the PT, many of the characters and background are CGI which was not in the green screen frame during filming at all but was added later.  So whereas the puppets aren't actually living creatures, they are at least there during filming.  And in my opinion, the difference in realism is obvious.  Particularly on Tatooine, which in SW looks like a real desert town with real dust, real people wandering around, real dirty vehicles, real wind, real daylight, etc., presumably because they all really were real when filmed.

PT Tatooine was also shot in Tunisia.  Just saying...

TV's Frink said:

PT Tatooine was also shot in Tunisia.  Just saying...

And SE (of course), but both with CGI added to reduce realism.

Bingowings said:

There is no comparison.

No, there isn't.  My post  was serious but the screencap portion was more of an attempt at a light moment -  start the comparison discussion, post two screencaps,  then become distracted by how shapely Carrie Fisher was 30 years ago.   I seem to have missed the mark. 

Here are my original caps before I decided to lighten the mood.

Outdoors in the originals - detail, color, shadows, texture, depth, perspective, etc is all much more real looking - because it is real. If it's a puppet, it still exists in the physical world. Even when there is a matte painting in the shot, it still looks much more realistic.

On the other hand, the prequels look like cartoons and video games.  No matter how much technology Lucas throws at them, they still look exactly like what they are - computer drawings made to emulate reality.  Again, I haven't watched them, so I don't know what the motion experience is, but they look fucking terrible.  Visually, they look completely unrelated to the originals.

Anchorhead said:

No, there isn't.  My post  was serious but the screencap portion was more of an attempt at a light moment -  start the comparison discussion, post two screencaps,  then become distracted by how shapely Carrie Fisher was 30 years ago.   I seem to have missed the mark. 

I thought you succeeded.

And to think that there are actual people out there who consider the CG Yoda more lifelike than the puppet. It's pure, unfiltered madness.

I prefer the CG Yoda to the TPM puppet.  But that puppet sucked.

The sad thing is they only did CG so Yoda could jump around like an idiot.  If you don't need him to do that, he can still be a puppet like in TPM.  But why did they change the puppet in the first place?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

TV's Frink said:

But why did they change the puppet in the first place?

  Same reason they didn't put belt rings on the PT lightsabers - apathy for continuity.

Belt rings?

The lightsabers in the OT had rings on the pommels with which it fasten to the belt with. The lightsabers in the PT didn't have these; they were attached to the belt by magnet instead.