Originally posted by: generalfrevious
You know this thread is just spiraling out of control- I just wanted to understand how the OOT DVD could be made state of the art in 1993 in an era of HD and widescreen TV

When Lucasfilm is saying, the transfer was state-of-the-art in 1993, they are referring to the restoration, not the picture quality.

Understand that film restoration is a relatively new subject, and that a lot of progress has been made during the last 15 years. 2 reasons for this:

1. Film studios wanted to make money by releasing their film libraries on DVD but had to realize their film stock was in a horrendous state, thus the increased need to do film restoration.
2. Huge increase in computer processing power and storage capacity. In 1993, you had a highly advanced(!!) PC if you had 66Mhz, 8MB Ram, 540MB harddisk and a 17" monitor with a Vesa Local Bus graphics card running 800x600 in 16bit colour. The thought of playing back compressed digital videos at 720x480 in 24bit colour from a 8,9GB (over 9000 MB!!!) optical disc consumer format (DVD) was insane back then. Now imagine how big the hurdles were back then to digitize a whole movie in HD resolution and have the processing power to do a digital cleanup, for a consumer product!