Gatefold artwork (Click to Enlarge):
Star Wars, Laserdisc, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Germany 1995. 5895-05
Widescreen 2.35:1 - Digital Stereo (German) - PAL - 4 sides (CAV)
The THX remasters started their European Laserdisc tour in 1995, being released in the UK, Germany, Spain and France. Like most other of the concurrent releases, Part 1 of the Leonard Maltin interview with George Lucas is included, squeezed in at the end of side 4.
This is a 2-disc set in a nice gatefold jacket. Each of these releases feature a sticker proudly claiming these as "the first time in PAL-CAV!" France also released a CAV set in 1995, but I'm unsure who was first. The CAV format has the "advantage" of each frame of the film being encoded on a dedicated track on the disc. This means you get perfect still frames when pausing, and lets you perform "trick-play" functions such as playing in slow motion in different speeds, playing backwards etc. In theory* CAV also yields superior image quality as you don't run the risk of one frame interfering with another as you would with a CLV disc where the frames are encoded one after the other in one, long, spiral track. The down side is you can only fit 30 minutes of video to a side, so the film has to be split up in half hour chunks across multiple discs. This also means the set is costlier to produce and raises the price considerably. In my opininon, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. *I say "In theory" because with a good LD player and a properly mastered CLV disc, I'm not convinced anyone could tell the difference.
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