drngr said:

poita said:

At 4K you are looking at about 20TB per film, minimum, the storage alone, even at the end of 1995 when prices dropped to $300 per GB it would have cost around 6 million dollars to store a single 4K scan of the film, and the computers of the time would really not been able to handle it.

Snow White was restored in 4K in 1993. I believe the Cineon system relied heavily on tape storage.

Yes it was, I was at Siggraph that year for the presentation, I remember Disney stating that the storage alone (5TB) was just over 10 million dollars.

And that is 1993 dollars, which is 16million 2013 dollars, and that doesn't include the cineon and operator costs.

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000000&year1=1993&year2=2013

It is a shame that they didn't do a 4K scan of Star Wars at the time, but understandable, the total scanning cost alone would easily have been tens of millions of dollars, a big spend. It doesn't seem that long ago, but in 1993 VHS was king and DVD didn't even exist yet...