zombie84 said:
There were a couple people here who had prints and tried to do something with them, but they are long gone as far as I know. I would suggest trying some 35mm collecting forums, and also not advertising that you will be transferring them to video. Any print you will get your hands on will be extremely rough though, so make no illusions about what you are up against. It will take a long time to clean it, unless you have access to proprietary software and hardware like Lowry. If the print is good, be prepared to spend four figures on it also. This sort of thing is probably the "greyest" area of home video collecting, as it is clearly illegal, so I'm not even sure how open you want to be about posting it on this forum.
If you have professional frame-by-frame scanners, or even a regular pro telecine, that will get HD results, you might want to consider a 16mm print. There are a few low-fade LPP prints from the 1980s out there that, when cleaned up, would get you better-than-DVD level of detail in an HD scan. More importantly though, it's much cheaper and easier to find (eBay), and slightly less "illegal" because 16mm isn't seen as a real piracy threat.
There were low fade prints struck on 16mm in the 1990's. Two such prints one of empire and the other jedi were sold on the 8mm forum. Empire was bought by someone on these boards.
I did not have the funds or i would have purchased Jedi. Both were not dupes, both struck from an original source negative. Probably the very same prints made in the 1990's for fan conventions and official printed by Lucasfilm before the special edition. These were supposed to have been destroyed but somehow made their way into collectors hands.
The reduction 16mm print that was recently up on ebay of jedi is clearly a dupe made from a faded 35mm release print and probably a bootleg if not a foreign made print, or military purposes print.
The super8mm one was officially licensed by Derann, and it on no fade LPP mylar stock. It was released on magnetic mono. Some collectors rerecorded the print into stereo but that ruins the collectibility of the print because for preservation purposes it would only be good for the video since they erased the theatrical audio in replaced it with the laserdisc audio.
Also these prints with magnetic and not optical audio are problematic to ship because placing them near any magnets will wipe the recorded audio.