Converting to anamorphic does involve upscaling the picture slightly. This is almost the last thing any studio or mastering facility wants to do. The only benefit I can really see is one of convenience - of not having to adjust your 16:9 TV/projector to make the image fill the screen horizontally. I converted my set to anamorphic only for this reason. Remember that the laserdisc masters were originally only ever intended to be seen on a standard definition 4:3 screen, and when viewed this way they look barely distinguishable in terms of clarity from the anamorphic SE DVD's. While lucasfilm may have added a bit of additional DVNR to the laserdisc masters to tame some of the more excessive grain and noise, this doesn't mean it wasn't already present on the master tapes. Some form of analog or digital noise reduction was standard procedure when preparing home video content in those days. The releases of course look atrocious in absolute terms on a full HD screen, but still better than the analog playback of a laserdisc player would - but changing them to anamorphic does not magically make them look much different. I've played around with sharpening, contrast boosting, grain removal and color adjusment on sections of the footage but find this always has more negative than positive effects on the overall quality so my anamorphic conversion involved upscaling only.

Relative to the age of the masters and the limitations of a standard def source though, I think they look rather good and certainly better than many a fully anamorphic transfer I've seen.

Of course by 2011 standards, now that the crossover from SD to HD is deeply entrenched throughout the consumer domain, the release is fairly ludicrous. But they could *just* get away with it 5 years ago. If they'd released them that way in 1998 or 9 they might have been fairly well regarded.