A New York Times article has revealed more news about the James Bond movies on DVD remastering project. Specifically, nine Bond DVDs will be remastered to the best of the technical ability by the people at Lowry Digital. The nine DVDs include all of the Sean Connery era Bond films, as well as other films yet to be announced.

So what will be the difference between the regular Bond DVDs and their beefed-up digital counterparts? In a method called 4K screening, Lowry Digital will scan one frame of film 4,000 times every four seconds. During this process, Lowry Digital's 600 Macintosh computers create and capture digital replicas of each frame. Currently, 1967's You Only Live Twice is under digital screening.

To put it in perspective, TV, DVD and even HD-TV data is dwarfed in contrast to Lowry Digital's process that digtally stores 4,000 lines of data. TV data normally broadcasts signals with 480 lines of data, HD-TV at 1,080 lines, and most DVDs normally at 1,080 (sometimes in the range of 480 to 2,000). The rule of thumb: the more lines of data, the more crisp and clear the digitized image will be.

There has been no word on a complete list of Bond DVDs to be remastered, or a release date (although some rumors have been floating around to the tune of November 2005). MGM executives declined to say whether or not the DVDs will actually show up on store shelves or any other information about the project. The Times article stated that "MGM executives decline to say when they'll be releasing these Bond DVD's - or anything else about the project, except to confirm that it exists. The new discs won't be out until next year at least - perhaps in part to avoid angering consumers who bought the 20 Bond films in three boxed sets that MGM put out just last year."