Hey guys, just thought I would put up my review of Dark Jedi's Blu Ray version of Empire Strikes Back.
When you put the disk in, the menu is of the same style as Star Wars. Crisp, high resolution, cycling slowly through different movie posters from ESB with all the various options, scene selections, bonus features(!). The menus look very sharp and crisp, with gentle music playing in the background which is great because I hate when the music on blu ray menus is so in your face and constantly looping every 30 seconds. Very tastefully done.
The first thing I checked out was the bonus features. The feature offered on this release is a real treat - the rare 1980 Empire hotline recordings released to hype the movie. Included is Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, C3P0, and Princess Leia. When you select each one a still image of the character comes on screen and you hear a 30 second or so speech from the character describing their character and their motivations going into ESB. I found this to be a lot of fun, and the audio sounded great!
Next, there are a ton of audio options; very impressive, and the sound quality was just fantastic. To have all these options is amazing. From the start of the movie I must say the crawl looked less sharp than from Star Wars. This is due to the source material; I know DJ cleaned this up as much as he could. When the movie opens in a blue Hoth, there is a good amount of grain, which I prefer to the alternative. As the movie progresses it is apparent that more grain reduction has taken place, but this is an issue with the source GOUT.
What I would say about picture quality is that it is by far the best I have ever seen ESB's theatrical version. This is vastly superior to Lucas' GOUT and is a real treat to watch. As a previous reviewer noted, I did see a few "bad frames", (but not many!) and they are really so minor that they did not bother me in the slightest. GREAT WORK DARK JEDI, this release has already surpassed my expectations of what I was hoping this set would be! I really look forward to watching RotJ and will post my review on that in the next few days.