Originally posted by: Skyranger
If these DVDs are to be from a 1993 video master, I can't imagine they'll look any different than Laserdisc. However, I have two reasons to believe that Jim Ward's references to 1993 are not to a video master. I believe it's very unlikely that the original Star Wars opening crawl without "Episode IV A New Hope" was transferred to video in 1993. I also believe that it's very unlikely that any video masters made in 1993 would have been recorded in anamorphic widescreen.

The last time the original Star Wars Trilogy was released was in 1995 according to my VHS box. One of the big selling points (VHS and Laserdisk) was how THX "digitally mastered" the original film. They supposedly cleaned and fixed the video digitally. Therefore, I would assume that this master was done in 1993, which was just prior to 1995. On both Laserdisk and VHS, widescreen versions of the film were available. That means that the "master" done in 1993 was probably of a quality where an "anamorphic widescreen" DVD release should be possible.

I've been studying the differences between DVD and Laserdisk, and DVD outclasses Laserdisk in a number of ways. The most obvious is that DVD has a much higher image resolution. I found it interesting to learn that Laserdisk used no compression since it's video was an analog format, not digital. That means the compression artifacts, visible on poor DVD productions during high speed movement on screen, are not experienced with Laserdisk, and it actually mimics film better in this regard. Yet modern DVD compression techniques elimate this problem almost entirely. All in all, I believe the same digital master from 1993 should look better on DVD.