One thing to note, with a Technicolor print, you do not get very much added grain. That is a huge benefit in clarity. As a frequent viewer of TCM, I can tell you that they usually just telecine the prints they have on file in the archive for broadcast. You can really tell that the quality of some of the early Technicolor prints was not that great as even at 720p there is some obvious misalignment. It doesn’t diminish the fantastic colors or the fairly sharp image. Not as sharp as the high quality black and white, but sharper than some of the other color formats. Though I think with access to the original negatives and the color separations, modern computer technology could achieve a higher alignment. From what Mike Verta has done, I think you could even scan one of those old Technicolor prints and realign the color and adjust for any fading or printing issues and achive a decent (for home viewing or broadcast) HD picture quality.

For our beloved 1977 Star Wars, this does mean we can’t be 100% certain of the quality of the extant prints. Lucas obviously had the best one. They are a good reference, but the images that DrDre has been showing us tend to show that the Technicolor prints are a bit off in a variety of ways. I’m thinking, since they were shutting down production in 77, that they are probably print control issues rather than fade issues. I think if we combine information we are gathering about the color film stock prints with what we have on the Technicolor prints we will be about as close as we can get. We need to identify how the colors are different and apply that to a technicolor print scan to get as close to the original as is possible at this point.