I'm happy enough with the GOUT for now. I just hope people wisely don't buy the next new Star Wars set on blu-ray unless it has the original movies restored and deleted scenes.

I recently watched my cowclops (transferred using ntsc cld-97 I believe) Empire disc. It makes the Gout look like it really was properly restored. There's just too much video noise from the laserdisc player (even one of the real high end ones) that didn't compress well on a single layer dvd. The lack of compressed analog video noise makes a big difference. And the grain on the Gout isn't so bad, that shows where they didn't use DVNR. And the grain can be filtered out much better today than it could in 1993 anyways. The scene in Empire where Luke peers around the corner to see Han's frozen carbonite floated across the hall has no grain on the walls because it was smeared out. Much rather have the grain and no ghosting.

Even on an HD set, the Gout looks far better than cable tv. Especially the standard channels which look far worse on a flatscreen, equivalent to the average youtube video. Even standard def shown on an HD channel looks so much clearer than the same thing on a SD channel. It's like the Gout to bootleg difference. Same picture source but with far less junk and picture interference. So if people feel the unaltered dvd's are "unwatchable" on an HDtv, I hope they don't watch much actual television or else they'll be cringing like crazy.