S_Matt said:
However, I have a collection of the theatrical trilogy in widescreen format on a medium that won't degrade and capable of a presentation that is 100% digital. Boycotting it would have been a case of cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.
Exactly. And I do have a laserdisc sourced anamorphic version but the official dvd blows it out of the water in terms of clarity and lack of video noise. It also feels much more authentic because any of the grain or film tears is not obscured by a bunch of blurriness. It's one thing to watch a beat up and unrestored version of a movie since you are seeing the movie as it is or was at one point in time. But I find it unbearable to watch a video that looks like a vhs with generation loss. It looks like all this dirt is on a projector and you can't set it to focus on the screen properly, or like a flat screen tv with terrible blur and motion smearing.
The improvement of the unaltered dvd over the laserdiscs does show why the dvd format was such a huge hit. Without even putting any real effort, LFL got pretty much as good as a high quality studio master tape on a consumer medium.
See, higher resolution is not nearly as important as many seem to think. Lack of junk obscuring the picture is a far bigger deal. I've played How to Train Your Dragon blu ray and dvd on the same player hooked up to the same 1080i HDtv via HDMI and I barely noticed any difference. The trees in the background had more detail. But most people won't notice that.
This is why blu-ray has not been as successful as dvd. Salesmen will swear until they're blue in the face that the difference from blu-ray to dvd is far greater than dvd to vhs. By resolution capability, they may be correct. But that's not the real thing people notice as much.
Not being in focus is a much more obvious flaw. And that's what vhs fuzzyness did to everything. This is why if you ever have the choice between a standard def video camera with manual focus and a HD one of comparable quality with auto focus only, you should get the manual. Heck even my Hi8 camera with a manual focus can get sharper video than some tiny camcorders that might says HD on the side but only have auto controls.
In fact, assuming the Star Wars blu-ray is the same 2004 transfer, I bet the blu-ray will not look as improved over the 2004 dvd as the 2006 dvd did over the laserdiscs.