jjreason wrote:It's my understanding you need to purchase the whole saga to obtain the archives discs (deleted scenes & other fun stuff). I also read that the BluRay discs were written from the same source as the DVDs, so as far as "overall" movie quality goes, there isn't such a massive disparity. The newly added or newly fixed stuff looks, well newly added or newly fixed. Vader talking to Moff Jerjerrod to start ROTJ looks much the same on blu as it does on DVD, in my opinion.
Yup, it seems that the trilogy sets don't have any extras aside from the two commentaries per film, included on each disc.
Being written from the same digital masters still means that the Blu-rays are significantly less compressed than the DVDs. DVDs display 480 lines of resolution in an image while Blu-rays display 1080. There's something of a difference in the image on my TV, which is a 4:3 clunker from 2004, and the Blu-ray player won't even play anything above 480, and it still looks a bit better due to the fact that it simply has more image information.
Ran wrote:No scene where the Royal Guards kick someone's ass? I thought there were stills from the scene.
There's a lot of deleted Moff Jerjerrod material from ROTJ, including where two Royal Guards are behind him, force pikes out and all, while Vader chokes him for not letting him through to see the Emperor. That's all the deleted Royal Guard material on there, except for a ROTS animatic where Yoda disposes of them in a different way.
Here's a good rundown of most of the deleted scenes in the set. The scenes themselves are more interesting from a "what could have been" perspective than actually "good," so to speak. I mean, there's a reason most of them were cut. Some of them are quick and goofy, but some are downright fascinating (particularly one where Leia visits Luke after his wampa attack). It's clear that the most interesting prequel scenes were already used on the DVDs, and most of the effects are nowhere near finished, but again, it's fun to see the evolution of these kinds of things.
Aside from the deleted scenes, there's an insane amount of material organized by movie, and then by planet, including interviews, concept art (a lot of which I've never seen, or at least not for a long time), and incredibly in-depth looks at props, costumes, concept models, and that sort of thing, most of which have featurettes with the people who created them and related anecdotes. Even after all the stuff that's been released over the years, how there is still so much to be shown is amazing.
As for the films themselves, I've only watched the prequels, but have skimmed through the OT to check out the changes. Indeed, if you're not on an HD setup, there's not a hugely noticeable difference in picture quality. That's true of every film except for TPM, where they got rid of the shitty, blurry, red-tinted, zoomed-in DVD transfer and present the film as beautiful as it was ever supposed to look (hell, maybe better). CGI Yoda is a huge improvement as well. If you don't buy this set, but like this film at all, you owe it to yourself to check out this version (and compare it side-by-side to the DVD, it's pretty awesome).
The audio is another standout part of the set. Again, my setup is far from state of the art, but there's a much more noticeable "punch" to the films in that the loud parts are, uh, significantly louder than the quiet ones. The difference is much greater than on the DVDs, and much more dynamic. Basically, it fucking rocks.
So if you can suck it up and deal with the combined total of two minutes of changes (most of which is CGI Yoda), then you should look into this set a little more seriously. If not now, then at some point in time. I'm not saying you have to buy it, but at least check it out wherever you can.
Again, for pacing this works WAY better the way it's presented in the film. 