It does seem like they did indeed finally ditch the Lowry POS master as a source. Anything and I mean ANYTHING that company ever touched is atrocious in all sorts of ways.
While everything so far seems to indicate that this is the Reliance 4K stuff we’ve been discussing back and forth it also appears to perhaps be the final LFL led SE master where they inserted even Maclunkey before handing over the reins. So I’m a bit torn now. I was avoiding these like the plague and have no use for the 19SE or the frozen grain and other tomfoolery that shows they have no desire to properly care about proper film presentation-and yet this is so much better than anything we’ve officially gotten visually since…well since the 97SE LD release actually.
Darn it i’m not going to let them dangle the bloody carrot at me…the fact that the BD.com review is harsh says something-they’re almost NEVER harsh when they should be and the audio “reviews” are more of a joke since there only generalities for the most part.
But the Prequels are all kinds of ugly. ROTS seems ok and they will never be all that nice to look at. I’ve heard AOTC supposedly gets rid of the teal color shift of the BD which would be great.
But TPM is APPALLING. Sure the main source is a roughly 2K filmout of everything done long ago but to take that and rescan for the 3D release and hit 100% with overzealous DNR and processing then bring it to 1080p and then upped to 2K and then uprez that to 4K…it’s hideous. And all they had to do was present the source untouched and it would at least look ok for what it was. they seem to go nuts with over-processing the image in each format. The LD is bad, the DVD is bad, the BD is bad and now the 4K polishes every aspect of a visual turd.
Those who have picked these up, what do you think of the sound mixes? The prequels have always had great audio but TPM has never sounded as good as the LD audio to my ears and I still think they started tinkering on AOTS/ROTS audio on the 2011 discs.
I would hope the OT at least now sounds better than the 2011 mixes but reports seem to indicate it is still the base 2011 mix with those changes still intact.