Yes, in the ROTJ SE most of the wipes were unchanged, so there may be some softness there but that’s not what I’m talking about in the video - I’m talking about what joefavs said. Here’s a comparison of a shot of Han aboard the shuttle and the same angle from a couple of minutes later:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/150516

And this drop in quality persists for several minutes (joefavs has it right - up until the speederbike chase) and I’ve seen some HD scans of prints, which clearly show that this drop in quality wasn’t there in the theatrical prints, in fact, even the theatrical prints actually have much better detail in this section than the BD, so it’s definitely a problem specific to this transfer and it may seem too careless even for Lucasfilm but that’s what happened - my guess would be that the scan did actually go a bit out of focus in that section, but because the master was being done for DVD and for DVD the detail was still fine and they were in a big hurry, they probably just threw a sharpening filter at it and it looked ok on DVD. But this transfer should never have been used for an HD release.

Also notice what I call the carpet syndrome - thin vertical lines running through the whole image, making it look like it’s being projected on a carpet - this is actually present throughout the whole transfer but it’s most obvious in this segment, (which only goes to prove they sharpened it more than the rest, which would make this kind of artifact more visible). It can be dealt with using a slight horizontal blur, which is why it’s not visible on the HDTV captures, which are quite a bit softer than the BD but I’d really love to know what caused this, because I’ve actually seen this effects on many studio masters I’ve worked with in my job and it’s a bit of a mystery to me.