Easterhay said:

The reason, though, that the prequels look so differently to the originals is that we're seeing The Republic in its prime - well in TPM we are; watch AOTC and see the scuff marks all over the floor in The Jedi Temple; see how refugees now have to travel from planet to planet to find work - this is the beginning of the recession. Come ROTS and Palpatine is ploughing all the money into the war effort. So, naturally, we start to move towards the look and feel of A New Hope, were martial law is crushing the people and everything has a delapidated look to it.

I'd say that's reading in to the films meaning that isn't apparent by the films themselves.

TPM looks slick and shiny, AOTC looks slick and shiny and so does ROTS. It looks slick and shiny because CG looks that way naturally, and also because digital cameras render things that way. If you use CG to the extent that Lucas did and then use a digital camera to capture it, its just partly inevitable. Thats why films like 300 and Sin City have similar qualities, except there it was supposed to be a deliberately unrealistic stylization, rather than the failure to emulate reality using the most sophisticated technology possible.