Subs look nice, and darkening Vader in the hallway is quite good. Can't believe I never noticed that before, but the 2004 version looks utterly ridiculous. It's completely out of character with the photography, and unrealistic for it to appear that way given the lighting. The brightened corridor in Echo Base during Han and Leia's argument about him leaving seems like the same kind of thing, though that one I did notice a long time ago.

The 'plastic' look of the 2004 transfer is a subtle yet irritating problem that may not be fixable. The main issue is that during the cleanup process they took it upon themselves to artificially sharpen parts of the image for some reason (Lowry himself boasts of this in an interview), resulting in imagery that could not possibly have been photographed in such a manner. Smoke and haze no longer obscure background lights and detail, depth of field is shot to hell, and many things just look somehow wrong and unnatural in ways that are difficult to explain. Add in the messed up colour timing and wildly fluctuating saturation levels, along with the crushed blacks, and the result is so far removed from what the movie is supposed to look like that even the most earnest and dedicated attempts can only repair some of the damage. We put up with it for the sake of having a clean and detailed image, as opposed to the jaggies, smearing, and softness of the GOUT, but it's quite sad that every look at the 2004 reveals some new flaw that we just haven't found a way to describe yet. I'm not very knowledgeable of photography or video at all, but the fact that the so-called "professionals" who made them can't see the problems is completely absurd.