I agree. Aside from a few glaring changes (Greedo, Jedi Rocks) I like the changes. It would be nice to have better versions of the unaltered films, and I'm sure that will come $ooner or later.

I will take the 97 versions any day of the week on DVD cause I absolutely hate Hayden in ROTJ, I HATE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm surprised no one here is talking about the recent HiDef airings of 'Star Wars Ep 4' and 'Ep 5: Empire Strikes Back' over on HBO (they're re-airing them back to back this Friday: Feb 9th). 'Ep 6: Return of the Jedi', doesn't seem to be on this month - go figure?!?

As for Ep 4 and Ep 5 - wow, both look like they were filmed yesterday. Ultra sharp, deep colours, superb 5.1 sound - these trounce the standard DVD's, as they should!

Supposedly the mpeg4 versions overseas trounce these.

I wonder if there might be better compression on HBO? Who knows. I'm just going by what the people who are torrenting them have said.

I caught some of Empire and Star Wars this weekend. Pretty solid transfers. Not much of an improvement on the DVDs though. And all the same problems with the DVDs are still there like the drowned out music cue when the X-Wings attack the Death Star and the "bubble gum" pink lightsabers(although that was less glaring).

Oh, and the biggest problem of all is that these are still the damn 2004 SEs! Which means Kiwi-voiced Boba Fett, Hayden ghost in ROTJ, and Greedo still shooting first.

They played TPM and ROTS a couple weeks ago, and AOTC is playing this week. So that's 5 of 6 on HBO.

Now the bastards are waiting until 3/6 to show Jedi!

So I'm waiting until then to watch all three of the OT, but previewing clips from my DVR, they looked great.

I still think they look like upconverted DVDs.

Oh yeah?

Well your reviews suck.

What do you know.

So YOU are the one writing all those emails!

I've watched all the movies on my Oppo, and the HD versions I've seen on HBO do seem sharper to me.

I saw a bit of Empire on HBO this last weekend. I thought it looked fantastic.

I found this comment to be quite interesting and got a chance to watch ANH tonight. I run my cable box and A2 over HDMI. I put the HD transfer on and the SE disc in the A2, about the best upconverting player you can buy.

The result? No fucking contest. The HD feed was tremendous. The upconverted DVD looked solid, but the HD feed was unbelievable. It looked like a brand new print. Solid colors and black levels, many "3d" shots, just very very clean.

I can't wait for the Fox Bluray releases. Should be even better than the HBO versions.

Maybe it's the HD feed I'm getting.

Good, I was wondering if I missed that one. I have all the others recorded on my tivo.

Yep the H.264 versions are sharper ever so slightly and block up less on motion or explosions. The difference is small but is clearly there, and the man versions clearly look better than dvd. They're not HD-DVD standards but they are the best yet anyway(barring the euro versions in H.264).