Of all the existing LD to DVD rips available to date, none that we have seen so far have used the "Faces" release. For the most part they have all used the Definitive Laserdisc release as a source. However, with that being said, this new ISOMIX transfer that is out there does utilize the "Faces" discs to replace parts of ESB (mostly Leia's welding scene). The first batch of Definitive sets that went out were missing the Leia welding scene in ESB so they were later replaced.

As to the question of whether or not the Definitive Edition was remastered.... yes and no. No, a newly remastered version of the Definitive set was never released, but this was most likely done to protect the collectability of this limited release. Instead, the set was remastered and released without all the extras as the "Faces" edition.

You can find a lot of this information at the Davis site: http://www.davisdvd.com/misc/ep4.htm

Of course we have to realize that not everyone that transfers the laserdiscs to DVD comes to this board and not everyone shares such transfers so we really have no way of knowing, however, as far as the OT board is concerned, there are no current rips that primarily use the "Faces" Laserdiscs.

MeBeJedi and Zion are currently working on their own independent transfers from the "Faces" set of discs. If you wade through the "Bootleg DVDs" you will find discusions on the differences between the "Faces" set and the "Definitive" edition. For the most part the main difference is in ANH. The "Definitive" edition version of ANH still had a lot of "noise" in it... it was a muddy transfer and needed some work. The "Faces" edition allowed Lucas and company to clean the movie up some more and run it through some additional noise reduction schemes to produce a higher quality transfer. This same noise reduction effort was performed on the entire set and thus makes it a major improvement for ANH but only minor for ESB and Jedi which were already pretty good.

Other than the extra noise reduction that the "Faces" set went through, the main difference is that the "Definitive" edition was in CAV format whereas the "Faces" set is CLV. This is only a big deal if you are using an extremely old laserdisc player for viewing. With an older player you can do frame by frame searching with CAV discs but not CLV, however most newer laserdisc players pulled off the same feat for CLV discs so the difference is very minimal in terms of functionality.

Rikter should be seeding out "a" version of MeBeJedi's ANH "Faces" transfer later this week... this will not be the "final" version but it should give us a taste of the quality that can be achieved both by using a better quality source such as the "Faces" edition as well as better knowledge of A/V conversions. I know we are all waiting in anticipation