I do recognize and appreciate Cowclops's desire to capture the LD as close to the original image as possible and seeing as how I have a cheap TV and quite a bit of time on my hands I have no problem adjusting the picture level for this particular disc. Actually a solution some of you might want to try to give this DVD a fair shake is write down all of the numbers for your picture settings, re-calibrate it for these DVD's and then when you want to watch normal DVDs just put 'em back in. Yeah, kinda obvious advice ("remember to breath when you need oxygen!") but I'm crap with remembering numbers so it helped me out and now I know I can easily go back to my calibrated settings for movies not captured from a laserdisc.

Now here's a question that I don't believe has been asked about these sets: Yes I recognize that laserdisc black is not DVD black and I understand why you would capture it "as is" so as not to lose detail, but are laserdisc COLOR levels any different? What I mean is aside from adjusting the brightness and contrast to get the two black bars to match should I also be fiddling around with the color settings? And can ANYONE give me an opinion on sharpness? I read a home theater guide that said you should turn sharpness all the way down because any setting above 0 is artificial sharpening (i.e. "edge enhancement") but I've never read said advice anywhere else and I'm wondering if that guy was just wrong.

Also something I noticed that I think might be an inherent problem with the laserdisc itself is that the very first scene (title/crawl/pan down to Star Destroyer) has a different black level than the rest of the movie, and I can't remember which but there were a couple other scenes where my very carefully blackened bars would suddenly appear grey again. Oh, and I did notice color noise in some blacks (particularly star fields), is that a result of capturing from LD as well? Lastly I noticed in areas that were comprised of one solid color that there would be some "guessing", I wish I knew the right term for this but basically it wouldn't look like a solid color but in stead a kind of sun bloom of different shades of that color very quickly moving around.

Sorry for the LOOONG post but I just wanted to say in a nutshell that I really dig this transfer. I don't have a 16x9 television so I can't appreciate the anamorphic aspect but once I played around with the picture settings I had it looking very nice on my 35", definitely the Star Wars I love. Also my little brother watched it on his 19" and I noticed that the smaller the TV you put it on and the further away you get from it the better it looks, I know that's true of ANY image but with this DVD in particular I was really hit by it, from a good distance where I couldn't notice all the noise and other ugly little bits of laserdisc problems it looked just like a professionally made DVD.