Mavimao said:

IMO, if Star Wars were to be restored and re released, they would have to use a combination of different elements. The original negative might be able to provide shots that don't have effects, and then you could splice in SFX footage culled from other sources. Of course, you would notice a more than usual drop in quality between the shots.

In this case, it might be wiser, cheaper and more efficient to just scan technicolor prints, or recombine the seperation masters of the whole film, do a simple cleanup and release it like that. This way, the quality stays more or less consistant and we would also have a very purist form of the film as it was seen in 77.

As far as ESB and ROTJ are concerned, I can't say for sure, but I would be willing to bet that better care was taken in pre-production and that dupe negatives exist, as well as high quality IP prints. If the article that Danny Boy pointed to is correct, they did not even touch the O neg for the SEs of episodes 5 and 6.

Correct.

A scan of a 1977 SW technicolor print at 2K would hypothetically yield more satisfactory results in terms of filmic continuity------than a 4K scan of the O-neg where there would be noticable jumps in quality from scenes without effects to shots with optical VFX.

"The problem is that film optical effects are a minimum of two extra generations away from the original negative, so there's more dirt, more contrast and more grain, and they're not as sharp," says Lowry. "Every time they went to a light saber shot-boom-there goes the sharpness, the grain came up and the contrast came up a little." As Rick Dean notes, "The problem is that nobody was ever expected to watch it directly off of negative. Projection prints are the result of four optical processes and photochemical processes, which naturally even things out."

http://business.highbeam.com/3770/article-1G1-122874997/restoring-star-wars-trilogy