Star Wars The Complete Saga MEMBER REVIEW Thread (1 Viewer)

Official HTF MEMBER Review Discussion Thread


As of this posting date, screeners have not been provided to press.


However, since these films are being made available overseas, we suspect some of our members will get their hands on these discs early.


[SIZE= 16px]If you have already purchased a copy, please use this thread to post your own review[/SIZE]


As copies arrive in stores later this week, we invite our members to write their own reviews.


Please note that discussion in this thread is to be strictly limited to actual product reviews by HTF members.

No reviews yet? Surprised!

Can you guys help us by refraining to post anything until you have an actual

review or comment of a review? Thanks.

Thanks Ron. Live in London, England so today is the official release day got mine this morning from HMV just had a chance to watch Star Wars A New Hope. So I will talk about that movie only today. The Good: Picture quality is better than it has ever been before in a home format (I own it as many of us do on CLV/CAV Laserdisc, DVD etc etc since they first came out back in the day......). PQ is full of constant grain pretty much everywhere. Overall considering a lot of the source material was never that great to begin with due to the low budget, film stock problems (they changed it quite early on) & the photo chemical visual effects process taking several generations of film prints until it was fully composited so removing detail each time they ran it through the optical printer etc etc. The level of detail in places is very good I doubt it could possibly look much better without re-compositing every single FX shot (ILM did redo some in 1997 for the SE). Overall the PQ is about what you would expect for a 1977 movie its not fantastic but better than previous home formats have allowed so for that alone its a blind buy for anyone who is a fan. Audio is ok. The sound mix now gives more emphasis to the sound FX & music as they overwhelm in places but all dialog is still very legible so the balance is spot on I can think of no way it could be improved considering how old most of it is (Vader's voice sounds as weak as ever compared to the much deeper sound in the other movies). Jabba Meeting Han. Looked to me like ILM had redone the scene it looks much better now. Animation seems more natural & Jabba looks a little less CGI. Not sure if this is the Bluray bringing this detail out or not but it felt more natural & looked much better for it. Vader vs Kenobi lightsabre battle on the Death Star. New CGI on the sabres looks very natural & how it should be in all shots. Flawless nothing to complain about. When Luke first uses his sabre on Tatooine after Ben has given him it again it looks pretty flawless & has a nice blue/white glow to it. The Bad: This is going to open several new cans of worms!!!!! so in no particular order. 1: The scene where the Millenium Falcon is escaping the Death Star & being attacked by Tie Fighters. You can clearly see some horrible brown travelling matte boxes around pretty much 95% of the Tie fighters as they swirl around the Falcon. It looks absolutely terrible & would not have been hard to fix. Why on earth did LFL let this pass QA?? 2: Princess Leia's opening dialog on the Freighter to Vader at the very start of the movie. You can clearly tell her voice is speaking but mouth not matching the words she is speaking! Its only a few secs but very noticeable to me! 3: Tantooine. Several scenes look really sub HD. In particular the last fade wipe before the camera fades where Luke has collected the droids from the Jawa Sandcrawler you can see some horrible distortion in the middle of the frame. It looks like a huge blob of smoke/film grain around Luke's body. I am staggered this was not fixed it looks really terrible. Then several other desert scenes before they get to Mos Eisley have problems with quick flashes of colour in the background mainly but's its still very noticeable to me & looks like a film stock problem from the source. 4: Mos Eisley canteen has 1 or 2 dodgy shots as well which look like sub SD closer to VHS than BD!!! This is due to a lot of grain & lack of detail it really looks rough! 5: The Starfields are very uneven. Some have blue/purple stars. Other's blue or purple stars then some white stars. In the death star battle its quite noticeable but earlier in the movie you can see in some scenes a very uneven look. ILM should really have made a standard starfield & stuck to it as some of these are clearly from the 1977 release! Sloppy/shoddy QA again IMO. 5: Lukes Lightsabre on the Falcon when Ben is training him to use the force blindfolded. 100% not fixed it has a horrible white glow & you can clearly see the animation pencil marks on the sabre! Again how on earth did this pass QA is clearly not been redone in CGI. 6: Death Star explosion still fades to B+W & looks as strange as it did in 1997! The Ugly: If like me you use a powerful Desktop PC/Media Centre/HTPC to watch Bluray & hook it up to your HDTV/Projector then this is what I found: 1: PowerDVD11 will only play about 10 mins before exiting the movie with no warning & throwing you back to the desktop. This is with the latest 01/09/11 patch. The movie is unwatchable as you cannot even select a scene as this usually crashes PowerDVD11. It also cannot even handle the audio I counted 1 major dropout. You cannot blame LFL for this but Fox surely should work closely with Cyberlink to ensure a big release (and all releases work on release as expected). Fox obviously did not perform enough QA on Cyberlink players (they are some of the most popular so expect a lot of complaints next week when this is out globally!). I spent perhaps an hour trying to get it to work then gave up as I could see on Cyberlinks official forums others have issues as well. So big heads up to everyone make sure you have the latest firmware/software updated (I did beforehand & still had no luck!!). I could only watch the movie flawlessly on Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre 5. As I watch the other movies I will contribute to here as I go.

Just watched The Empire Strikes Back! Very happy to report I have little to say this looks absolutely amazing for a 1980's film!!! The level of detail is simply stunning especially on Dagobah you will gain a new level of appreciation of the set/model work its really intricate & detailed. Some of it looks like it could have been filmed recently which is the highest compliment that could be paid to a 31 year old movie which is heavy on photo chemical VFX work & several generations away from the original film elements. Princess Leia looks stunning the previous home releases did not do her any justice due to the subtle lightning/makeup used. Now Bluray brings out her natural beauty in full!! All the lightsabre's look very good. ILM have used some heavy bloom effects but it works and makes the sabres look deadly/beautiful. Few people could or would complain about the presentation its a very solid job the image is pretty clean but grain is still present. The Bluray brings out the budget difference between Star Wars & with this Bluray you can see it all onscreen in a good way!! Audio is perfect no complaints nothing to talk about really other than its pretty much perfect. The only negatives I can mention are minor but worth talking about as 1 is sloppy the other maybe intentional: 1: On the main titles as the crawl is ending you can clearly see an orange line on the furthest righthand side of the screen near the bottom. Its about 25% of the picture height. I'm guessing its to do with overscan & someone being sloppy on the transfer. Its only a few pixels wide but its there & obvious on my display (40" HDTV via HDMI). 2: Next I found more overscan related issues. For most of the movie but on Hoth I noticed it first there is at several times on scene changes in the top far left & bottom far left corners of the picture either a small black curved L shape or dirt on the image. This is present for most of the movie from Hoth onwards until Bespin when it more or less disappears. Sometimes its the L shape other times its a small dark mark. I think it maybe to do with overscan again. This is pretty sloppy & when or if you notice it I guarantee your eyes will be looking for it for a while (I know mine did!). Could be overscan/safe area but its very very sloppy if it was not picked up in QA........... 3: Finally once again the Tie fighters are proving to be a problem as for most of their onscreen time I could clearly see the travelling matte boxes around them in a dark blue hue but very easy to spot on the scenes when they are chasing the Millenium Falcon. 4: Also worth mentioning the startup times are pretty long. Well over a minute of loading until it brings the menu up (I have a constant internet connection so not sure if it performs additional checks when your connected to the internet for Java certificate updates.

Focusing on PQ The OT movies are in places, Sky shots for example plagued by frozen grain. This being typical of a Lowry restoration I expected that, they improve over the 2004 Dvd's but offer little over the HDTV broadcasts bar better compression and some better resolution of the added grain. Is it the best the films have looked on home video? Yes but looking at even low budget fair like The Evil Dead there is no way they should look this close to a HDTV broadcast with half the bitrate. Some issues with the 2004 transfers have been fixed, but many others have not, Hoth is still blue and there are still contrast problems. The PT fairs better but 2 + 3 also share contrast issues, 3 comes off the best however with the pure CGI moments looking amazing. TPM is a mess, one of the worst DVD's that THX have put their name to has been rescanned and would have blown away any previous version including HDTV (That always looked low resolution and with a pink cast) if not for the DNR added. People are saying that this was to bring it into line with the other PT films, but there is no reason to remove detail on what could have been the stand out transfer of this set. Extras I feel are a mixed bag, great documentary's like The Beginning and Empire of dreams are missing, and what is left is a hodge podge of things that feels thrown together. The deleted scenes (the few that were not already on youtube) are great to see and deserve a place on the set. The vintage making of's are ok for what they are but I didn't watch much of them past a few mins. The spoofs is weird, I was thinking they would be in chronological order, or some kind of order but they are kind of just one after another and nothing I had not seen before. This could have been the release to end all releases to show other studios how it could be done, but with releases like Bridge On The River Kwai, Taxi Driver, Rocky Horror and even The Evil Dead showing how amazing period film based productions (on any mm size) this set can look distinctly low rent and needed to be so much more.

Blu-ray.com has their review for THE COMPLETE SAGA: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Star-Wars-Blu-ray/14903/#reveiw Great review.. Glad i kept my pre-order....

Originally Posted by Alessandro

Blu-ray.com has their review for THE COMPLETE SAGA:

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I guess you missed the huge, boldface sentence at the bottom of Ron's first post in this thread:


Please note that discussion in this thread is to be strictly limited to actual product reviews by HTF members.

I wonder how Return... looks. The HTF review of the SD always struck me as a little unfair and highly innacurate since it was berating the transfer for basically and quite accurately conveying the technical inferiority of J-D-C Scope.

dpippel said:

I guess you missed the huge, boldface sentence at the bottom of Ron's first post in this thread:

 

Please note that discussion in this thread is to be strictly limited to actual product reviews by HTF members. 

 

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SORRY DID NOT SEE THAT !!!!!DID NOT MEAN TO RUFFLE THE UOT FEATHERS Oh i am a member of the HTF board and i will post also my review and it will go along side with the non professional reviews

Originally Posted by Alessandro

SORRY DID NOT SEE THAT !!!!!DID NOT MEAN TO RUFFLE THE UOT FEATHERS
Oh i am a member of the HTF board and i will post also my review and it will go along side with the non professional reviews

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There's no need to start getting personal. The owner of this forum clearly stated at the beginning of the thread that it was for member reviews and comments ON those reviews only. You didn't "ruffle" anything, although for some reason you seem to feel the need to make borderline personal attacks, both here and in the other SW Blu-ray threads.


Want some friendly advice? Tone it down.

dpippel said:

 

There's no need to start getting personal. The owner of this forum clearly stated at the beginning of the thread that it was for member reviews and comments ON those reviews only. You didn't "ruffle" anything, although for some reason you seem to feel the need to make borderline personal attacks, both here and in the other SW Blu-ray threads.

 

Want some friendly advice? Tone it down.

 

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As i have stated i did not see that until you told me about it.. And could you clarify for me what other Star Wars threads that i have been on and HOW you have my personal info to know where i was????

I'm talking about other SW threads here at HTF. But I see there's no point in continuing this.


Hopefully Ron or another moderator will step in here and delete these off-topic posts.

dpippel said:

I'm talking about other SW threads here at HTF. But I see there's no point in continuing this.


Hopefully Ron or another moderator will step in here and delete these off-topic posts.

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Oh sorry i thought you meant else where and your right i will tone it down sorry if have offended anyone.

I have deleted the off-topic posts.


Please keep this thread related to HTF member review posts.


Great to see the reviews rolling in thus far. Thank you for submitting them.

Lord Dalek said:

I wonder how Return... looks. The HTF review of the SD always struck me as a little unfair and highly innacurate since it was berating the transfer for basically and quite accurately conveying the technical inferiority of J-D-C Scope.

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There are some issues where horizontal resolution dips, its odd and looks like temporal DNR in places

Mike Wadkins said:

There are some issues where horizontal resolution dips, its odd and looks like temporal DNR in places

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What is your overall opinion of the OT on blu?

Alessandro said:

What is your overall opinion of the OT on blu?

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I have posted above, very poor given its importance and budget. But I am used to watching it in HD from the HDTV versions so the upgrade is not as drastic to me, it is using the same masters as the HDTV versions and the 4 movies shot on film need a full restoration at over 1080p (the resolution Lucasfilm asked Lowry to use) It Universal used these transfers again people would be all over them, but I feel there are some blinders as people get swept up in the movies.

Mike Wadkins said:

I have posted above, very poor given its importance and budget. But I am used to watching it in HD from the HDTV versions so the upgrade is not as drastic to me, it is using the same masters as the HDTV versions and the 4 movies shot on film need a full restoration at over 1080p (the resolution Lucasfilm asked Lowry to use) It Universal used these transfers again people would be all over them, but I feel there are some blinders as people get swept up in the movies.

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I just don't get why LFL had a press event and said that they worked on this for 3yrs only for it to come out and look like this... I smell another release down the road.

Alessandro said:

I just don't get why LFL had a press event and said that they worked on this for 3yrs only for it to come out and look like this... I smell another release down the road.

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I see little point in them spending too much money on this set, when they have to do a near full remaster for the 3D releases