Harmy said:

Well, there isn't much more left to say, short of confirming that the 2004 master is cropped less than the GOUT but still there is some cropping compared to all the information available on a 35mm print. I totally understand it being cropped; most damage usually appears on the edges of prints and even on the print, the edge of the image isn't always exactly the same, so you need to leave some space for that. What I absolutely don't understand is why on earth is every shot in every transfer cropped differently? Why would they do that? I'd understand every reel having slightly different cropping but why every shot? And the amount of cropping is so small that I don't buy that it's to keep the action in the centre. Also if they just cropped by the same amount on all sides, they'd keep the originally intended centre, which should be most desirable with this minute amount of cropping.

I can't speculate about the scene-to-scene cropping. That really is confusing too.

But for the overall cropping, maybe the technology of the time made it difficult to capture the whole frame. Remember that the blu-ray of Phantom Menace has more picture information that the previous version; this was supposedly due to some technological limitation in the past.