AVTAK
LD vs SE vs UE vs BD
The LD is slightly cropped on the left, a bit stretched on top and bottom, a bit contrasty but is otherwise an excellent transfer with only occasional spots of aliasing. The Dolby Stereo PCM is rich, full and has a touch of upper end distortion here and there but nowhere near as much as what plagued FYEO and OP to a lesser extent.
The SE utilizes the same print source from apparently a fresh scan, as has been evidenced by most of the other SEs. Color is generally more refined along with fine detail. The biggest difference is in skin tones which are now reddish, whereas on the LD they were washed out and pale looking. I did notice some shots looking as if they had gone with a pink tint-(iceberg sub for example) but overall this only pops up every once and a while. Great transfer for the SEs to be honest. The 5.1 is a remix of the Dolby stereo and seems virtually identical save for one bit. The distortion is lessened but still present in the helicopter crash during the teaser. High end is better defined along with channel seperation. The LFE is about the same as the matrix track despite being discrete. Overall it is compressed a touch and comes across as louder than the LD PCM.
The UE of course has the cropped opening for no apparent reason and slight cropping for the rest of the feature. It seems to use a scrubbed copy of the SE master being one of the video sourced titles. Bits of the Lowry teal and pink tints that are in OP and MR start to pop up but they are more subtle than what we usually describe. Skin tones appear a bit less reddish but it does look like the contrast and brightness levels were raised a bit. The BD tames this back a bit and overall looks much healthier without the video nasties of DVD. Both have the original Dolby Stereo track from the LD in DD 2.0.
Mix differences I noticed:
The helicopter hitting the ice and exploding has noticeable distortion on all versions. The title song has some slight distortion on the Dolby Stereo, and this was fixed up for the SE 5.1. Both UE and BD use a new 5.1 remix of the tile song which adds heavy vocal echos in places along with pumping up the rear channels unnecessarily.
The Dolby stereo has the gunbarrel fire go straight to the rear, and the SE pans it hard to the right rear. UE and BD follow suit leading me to believe they simply worked from or ported the 5.1 remix.
Conclusions:
All are good but being the nitpicky person I am I'd have to go with the SE overall for more closely replicating the 1985 release prints. It's not perfect but with a little tweaking could better match the LD and UE/BD in some shots. It seems to strike a balance between them. And of course it's fully uncropped.
The LD may be closest to the 007 Dossier's trailer scan.
But for HD if we worked backwards from the BD it could be slightly tweaked to get rid of the pinks, teals etc. that were added in 2006+reinstate the missing camera shake for the earthquake and add in the LD PCM.