skyjedi2005 said:

In Lowry's defense the final color grading was done before it was sent to them and fucked up by Lucas. They were only given a 1080P master to work with its hard to recover detail that is not there, especially when you dvnr the hell out of a 1080 scan. That was not even state of the art in 2004, despite the bs claims of the Lucas folks during the hype of the BD release.

Try that would have been state of the art circa 2001.

And would have been excusable for the dvd format because the sins of the dvnr would not show as bad. To use that same master for the blu rays and not do a new 4k or 8k scan is laughable to say the least.

I couldn't agree more. Not that I personally have much if any love for the SE anyway. You look at all the previous releases - Laserdisc after Laserdisc it was a new Telecine all the time! Then, because Lucas is an arse, he refused to release the 1997 SE on DVD. In 2000, I think, he released the Special Editions on VHS and Laserdisc! How pathetic you don't even release it on the current technological medium. The DVD didn't come until 2004. The bluray didn't come until 2011. That's SEVEN full years later. Lucas has managed to make more changes to the thing, and only he can explain why, and yet he didn't do a new transfer. As for 8k scan, I think 4k would be well enough for these films, after all 1080p does reproduce "nearly all" of the resolution.

Noise Reduction is fine when done properly. Lucas on the other hand always wants far more than should be applied, he basically doesn't want to see evidence of his movie being shot on 35mm, he wants to be able to pretend it was shot in digital.