I’ve been quickly partly-Despecialising and tonemapping down to SDR the 4K Disney Plus releases for my own personal use in a marathon very soon. Most shots look noticeably sharper in this new master than the Bluray, and even with only the ~20gb streaming versions of the 4K releases available, there are noticeably fewer compression artifacts during motion. They’re a great version of the films (as a base for projects which remove Lucas’ worst ideas for changes, of course).

Except for this shot. Ignore the colours, it’s my own tonemapping of the HDR down to SDR for my TV, which is nowhere close to being properly calibrated, so they’ll look off on anything which is. The point is it’s blurry and looks like it’s been upscaled. Lots of detail is missing. I included part of the wipe in the comparison because I believe this might give us evidence that this is what this shot actually looks like in the negative/how it potentially looked in 1997. The sharp detail seems to wipe in slightly behind the main wipe. See the edge of the bunch of air ducts (?) on the centre-left; the left side is blurry but the right is sharp, and then in the next frame the whole thing is sharp. I think the sharp version of this shot is an alteration made for the 2004 master, when they redid the landspeeder. It seems what’s happened for this release is they’ve just composited the 2004 onwards landspeeder onto the blurry version of this shot from 1997 (and shifted the landspeeder to the ~~left~~ right slightly).

So for anyone like me who enjoys some of the Mos Eisley changes, you’d probably want to grab this shot from the Bluray.