Mavimao said:

Unfortunately, the original optical shot negatives have faded away, so yes, George was right in saying that the original Star Wars doesn't exist.

Mverta was probably right in saying that the Technicolor IB prints are the highest quality prints available to us.

Also, your article pointed out something interesting. It mentioned that Empire and Jedi only used scanned IPs for the SE....

Hmm.

I am not so sure if they faded away.

It is more likely that the quality was never good to begin with(by modern standards).

It sufficed for 1977 because that was the best they could do at the time.And audiences were still blown away because nobody sat in a theater in 1977 and analyzed the increase in grain very time an optical shot came up.