Having viewed the 5 Beyond Westworld episodes from the torrent now, I made a few observations:

S01E01 "Westworld Destroyed" - Taken from a videotaped broadcast source, as evidenced by the announcer's voiceover on the credits.

S01E02 "My Brother's Keeper" - Also from a videotaped broadcast, but for some reason this particular copy had no sound. An alternate version I watched from a different videotape source had sound but was missing the opening teaser segment.

S01E03 "Sound of Terror" - This is the last episode that was actually shown on TV, but this version was not from a videotape: it was taken from a low-budget telecine of an actual film copy of the episode. You can tell by the "hairy frame" around the edge of the picture, which looks exactly like the 8mm and 16mm films I've had transferred in the past (only a bit worse). The focus is very soft, and there are actually "INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE" bumpers at the breaks.

S01E04 "The Lion" - Not broadcast. Same kind of telecine transfer from an original film copy.

S01E05 "The Takeover" - Not broadcast. Same kind of telecine transfer from film. This final unaired episode unfortunately cuts off before the credits...but features George Takei as a robot doctor! Also, this episode and the one preceding it feature Russell Johnson of Gilligan's Island fame in what was probably going to be a recurring role, had the series continued.

So someone out there somewhere had the actual film reels for episodes 3, 4, and 5 and had them transferred. How many generations the torrent copies are from the original, it's hard to say...but I'm guessing the first generation looked a little sharper. As far as the videotaped first two episodes go, they were broadcast copies recorded off the air.

On the whole, these were not as bad as I kind of expected they might be. In fact, I rather enjoyed them. The acting was a bit hammy, as to be expected, and the whole "hiding a nuke-carrying robot in a rock band" concept was a bit of an eye-roller, but this wasn't a half bad show for 1980. Much better than Galactica 1980, for sure!

--SKot