zombie84 said:

I just watched a 1984 VHS tape of ANH that I bought a year or two ago. The film looked suprisingly great, very nice and vivid colours, but the tape broke at one point and got chewed up. Managed to fix it pretty easily but that one part will have noise over it forever now. Just goes to show that every time you watch these, they die a little more.

he he

I plugged my VHS player through an Optoma short throw(it can beam images 3 meters in width from as short a distance as 2.5 meters) projector that I bought a year or so back.

Stuck in my 1982 VHS of ANH and boom!!---a revelation----details that I had not seen before were very prominent with just the right amount of depth between foreground and background to instill a filmic sense to the proceedings----plus the fact that this unmastered version has a lot of dirt and scratches---it all adds up to quite an experience.

Because the 1982 transfer is quite bright there really is a feeling of a full picture(all be it in 4:3)-----as opposed to a transfer where a lot of the image is in shadow(ala the 2004 DVD)

This is the 1982 VHS PAL version BTW-----which is certainly better if not superior to NTSC(sorry my American friends!)

And the size of the image was roughly 1.5 in width by 2 meters in height---If I sat too close then the VHS's video noise(or even film grain!) became too distracting----but sitting further back yielded excellent results----+ the nostalgic factor of actually playing a physical cassette from the era is something that not even holding a 2011 digitally restored high def Blu ray can replicate.