Court Martial - Ion Pod revisited

[Metryq]

ZapBrannigan wrote:

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My second AMT Klingon ship, to my shock, was molded in black plastic. That was just weird.

Early stealth version, just prior to acquisition of the Romulan-made cloaking device. And the plastic itself absorbed radar.

[Robert Comsol]

Metryq wrote:

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Early stealth version, just prior to acquisition of the Romulan-made cloaking device. And the plastic itself absorbed radar.

With a white molded Enterprise model kit the manufacturers may have wanted to create a black and white contrast.

Come to think of it it would make a great chess game with a white Enterprise king and a black Klingon Battlecruiser one.

Bob

[BK613]

Perhaps the most influential image for me in constructing the AMT model in the 1970s was the blue-gray side view on Franz Joseph's Blueprints.

As for the injection plastic colors, the reasons varied over the years. Nice article about the model here for those who are interested.

[Doug Otte]

Robert Comsol wrote:

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Please take the time and look up "HDTV" at Wikipedia.org, by the mid-90's the arrival of public HDTV was already in the pipeline. For the anamorphic (16X9 enhanced) widescreen DVDs (introduced 1997) they didn't use pre-existing old masters but already made new transfers in HD to prepare for HD broadcast and downconvert the resolution to sell DVDs.

Many of these HD masters were used for HD broadcast but in many cases, once HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc arrived, the studios felt the original HD masters were no longer state-of-the-art and decided they needed new ones with better HD resolution.

I'm simply not sure whether TOS relied on these early HD masters or whether new ones were made. Even in the current HD resolution, I'd say there is about 10-20% original live action footage where original negatives apparently got lost (10-20% live footage seems to have been replaced with footage from low resolution film copies that equals the sharpness levels of the current TOS DVDs).

Sorry for strolling off-topic, I shall add an on-topic comment in a few minutes to put the thread back on track.

Bob

As I remember, the new HD-DVD/blu-ray versions were mastered from the original negatives. This implies that the two previous DVD versions (both from the same masters?) were made from lower-generation prints.

Both transfers could have been HD. Those who compared the new (third, concurrent w/ the HD-DVD/blu-ray versions) DVD versions to the first two versions (I haven't) claim they look better. As to whether they truly used the negatives, or just had better mastering (contrast, color timing, etc.) is open to debate, AFAIK.