Hello everyone,

Recently, I made a quick and “dirty” transfer of a Mitsubishi Special Widescreen Edition Empire Strikes Back, and I posted a screen cap in the Smear-Free '93 Thread here. Msycamore noticed that the scanline pattern during the scene where Vader strangles the Admiral was different than both the JSC and his Pioneer-pressed SWE. Mine appeared to have more horizontal detail, meaning vertical scan lines, the same ones that would later appear in all future releases (GOUT to 1997SE LD).

At first, I decided to upload a compressed xvid file to display the scene to see if any more could be noticed when this scene was in motion. When msycamore pointed out that it appeared to have a bunch of artifacts, presumably because of the way I transferred it, I thought that some of the inferior quality probably was because it was my first transfer that I stupidly did it on SP (2 hour) mode and also because it converted it to Xvid. Because of that I retransferred it on XP Mode with the addition of the 1997SE laserdiscs to show the overall quality of my set-up (described here in this thread). You can see the resulting DVD here. Surprisingly, it was still pretty low quality and msycamore pointed out that his Pioneer-pressed copy looked superior, as mine seemed to have edge enhancement and blown out whites. It is worth saying that my laserdisc does look accurate to this, that is to say pretty godawful.

Now, I’ll come to the point. 😃 I’m still left wondering my laserdisc would look so bad. Does this mean that all the Mitsubishi Special Widescreen Editions look bad, or is mine actually a fake (I got it for $1 at a book fair, so this is plausible)? Why would the Pioneer pressing look so much better if they’re the same edition? And my final question, if mine is inferior, why does it so the scan lines better than the clearer JSC and Pioneer SWE?

Help me, ot.com, you’re my only hope in understanding this mystery…

By the way, you can read msycamore and my original comments in the Smear-Free '93 thread here.