Considering how unhappy I’ve always been with the 2003 transfer (and subsequent cleanup), I am loving these. I am positive they are new transfers. ANH now matches color tones with TESB, ROTJ, and TPM instead of being overtly red (aka lobstermen). What leads me to conclude that it must be a new transfer instead of a recoloring is that some of the things are very hard to recolor. This would be easier going back to the negative and rescanning it using better, more modern equipment. They did match the crop of the previous transfer, but the magenta is gone. And this was due to the yellow color being lost more than too much magenta. All the 2003 bright magenta blaster flashes are now peachy like the GOUT and 35 mm versions. The yellow flowers outside the Lars dining room are back (not possible to restore this without rescanning the negative or another copy of the film as they were white - no yellow left). I would not expect to see this good a job unless they redid it. Too many instances of missing colors in the 2003 version. Plus it seems to be a color grade more consistent with the 35mm scans we have been done around here. All four movies do lean too much to the red. The darkness I thought I saw was actually just how the app shows in on my Android phone. When I stream it to my TV it looks really good. Some inconsistencies, but really good compared to what it did look like.
AOTC and ROTS appear to be untouched. I don’t have any 4k equipment to examine how they look in 4k, but the colors appear to be identical so most likely these are just upscaled from the digital masters. But the differences in the other films, even TFA, look to be from a completely different souce from what we had on Blu-ray. The corrections to ANH are incredible and TESB is far less blue in the snow scenes that we have had. I think they missed some of the recoloring Lucas did for the 2003 edition and I don’t want to point it out to them because it looks so much better.
Has anyone purchased the new discs? Is it this version or the previous version? I might have to buy ANH myself to check if no one else does.