I have the standard tos dvds i have compared them to the netflix prints which are the remastered new effects version. The netflix versions have most of the film grain removed and are superior to the sd dvds imo. I purchased the blu-rays yesterday for 58.29. Can i expect even better with the blu-rays or will they be the same as netflix?
Physical media will (almost?) always be better than streaming, due to compression to get the video to a manageable size for streaming.
I wasnt asking if there was film grain, netflix has grain but less and the color was a bit more vibrant....i want to know if the quality is the same or better than netflix.
Better. I have Netflix, too, and the quality really depends on when you stream -- whether or not you're in peak viewing hours -- and even then the quality can vary during a single episode. And, as already mentioned, compressed video isn't going to look as good as physical media (at least, not yet). Plus with the blurays you have the choice of watching episodes with new FX or with the original FX, which are also in HD. Also, I believe Netflix is cropping the episodes. Someone else will have to confirm this. Or I'll confirm it later when I get home and can access my Netflix account.
No cropping on Netflix, in fact the opposite. On occasion (and this might have been fixed) a few episodes showed the new effects shots at 1.78:1. "The Tholian Web" is one which did that.
I have the blu-ray set and seen it on Netflix. The blu-rays look slightly better. The episodes on Netflix look ever so slightly compressed, but you almost have to pause it and nitpick to see the differences. It's mostly apparent when there are colored lights on the walls in a background, in the gradation from brightness to darkness, you may notice a very slight banding effect.
When it comes to Netflix, the quality can change drastically depending on time of day, your internet connection, as well as other factors. It may look great during one viewing (as Borjis stated) but look terrible during another viewing, it really all depends. Plus with Netflix (and any other streaming service) they can choose to remove any show from their library at any time, whereas on physical media once you own it it's yours to keep and watch as you like. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Netflix and the like, but when it comes to shows like Star Trek where I always want them accessible I buy them outright.
^^I forgot about that. When you first start watching they look like a badly compressed youtube video, but usually clear up fast if you have a fast connection. And like you said, if your connection is having issues or not super fast they do look way worse all the time. I've noticed some blu-ray players with amazon and netflix apps don't stream HD content nearly as good a quality as they do on a ps3 or xbox with the same speed connection.
Thanks for the responses guys. Good to know. I have another question. For those of you who have smart tvs. Have any of you ever watched your trek tos dvds with the properly christianed soap opera effect turned on. You know the look, it makes the image look like it was shot with a camcorder. What it is actually doing as i understand is that its creating more fps. I am curious to know what tos looks like. Many films today are starting to use higher fps and the get that soe.
It looks like cheap garbage. My advice is to turn off all image processing. It does more harm than good.
replacing the amount of blur that was part & parcel of shooting at 24fps on film with the electronic supersmoothing does a serious disservice to damned near ALL stuff originated on film, not just TOS. HFR will find its place (probably porn and subjective shooting), but I hope it doesn't override stuff it wasn't meant for ... that'd be potentially worse than colorization by far. Geez, look at the stuff that was edited on video in the late 80s and 90s that has that occasional jump to video look (usually when they speed something up), it is distracting as all hell, and that's just an occasional thing. Theoretically you get used to everything looking the same, but I figure that's more a matter of what your eyes & psyche are willing to accept.
The blu-rays look better than the Netflix streams. Still, for someone like myself who can't afford the series on physical media, it looks terrific either way you go!
Actually to date, only two mainstream films that use a higher frame rate, the two Hobbit movies. And since they are natively at a higher frame rate they don't look quite as weird as a faked motion interpolation with standard frame rate material. Turning on the artificial frame creation of a TV is generally considered a no-no and certainly changes (ruins in many people's opinions) the entire look and feel of the content.
I absolutely agree .....but i was just curious how it looked. I will probably even keep my sd dvds just because they look closer to what i grew up with.
Maybe I should start a new thread on this one, not sure, but since this thread is talking about the Blurays: I just got the complete seasons 1-3 of TOS on Bluray and am looking over the BD Online content on the packaging. A link here talks about the content available but the CBS BD Live site appears not to exist now. The original Bluray content was posted in 2009. http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Star-Trek-BD-Live-Update/12226 Where is this material now? Is it on youtube? Did a quick search and could not find the roundtable discussion from the season 1 Bluray disc link. Anyone know what has happened to the material that was linked to? I would love to have that material, since I now own the discs and should be legally allowed to download it. Thanks,
Not sure, CBS may have finally just shut down the servers that contain it. There was no way to access the content without going through the BD Live interface, so I don't know how people would have put it up on YouTube easily. As I recall it isn't all that amazing stuff, if it was really good it made it on the discs. Also in order to rule out it being an issue on your end be sure you have BD Live enabled properly, this means connecting a 1GB+ flash drive to your BD player and designating it as BD Live storage space.