The officially released non-anamorphic DVDs are watchable, but the image is predictably soft. The DVDs also suffer from a great deal of ghosting and grain, and this is very apparent on a large television. Pixilated edging is also apparent in many scenes. Even so, these DVDs definately get watched in my home the most when I am in the mood for Star Wars. In fact, I haven’t really watched the SEs in some time.

I have a 65” Mitsubishi rear projection HDTV. I am playing the DVDs with an Oppo DV-970HD, unconverted over component video. The upconversion seems to yield an ever-so slightly better picture than conventional 480p.

I think these definitely look better than any of the previous “fan preservation” editions that I have seen. Still, this is far from the best non-anamorphic presentation I have seen for a widescreen film. The Abyss is still the best non-anamorphic widescreen DVD in my book.

Additionally, the discs are actually improperly tagged as containing 4:3 material. Non-anamorphic DVDs containing widescreen films are usually tagged as such. The aforementioned Abyss is a good example. Advanced DVD players (such as my Malata DVP-520) will automatically frame the movie properly for a 16:9 TV without having to zoom or scale the picture, even though the disc is non-anamorphic.

The original Star Wars DVDs, however, get grouped along with a few rare releases such as Sister Act 2; in that these DVDs were mis-tagged as containing 4:3 material. As such, I have to manually zoom the picture to properly fit my 16:9 Mitsubishi HDTV.

There actually seems to be some confusion here in regards to the term “anamorphic” and how it is applied to DVDs. There is actually no way to make a non-anamorphic DVD anamorphic. It either is or it isn’t. Using a DVD’s zoom or scaling feature can in no way change the content that is encoded on the disc. It only frames the picture accordingly by cropping the encoded image.