And even fewer people are buying TV shows on Blu-Ray, for the most part. There's still a healthy (though shrinking) market for TV shows on DVD out there, but Blu-Ray is a harder sell. This is too bad, really. I'm glad we have The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-Ray, though.
I've just reluctantly got Netflix (and then only because it's free for six months) to watch Daredevil when it's released. Anything I really like I'll always want on physical media, preferably Bluray. I realise I'm some sort of dinosaur, but I want something I can touch... Ps - why the hell do people buy HD TV's and then buy DVD's ? Don't they want to view in er, HD ?
Some people can't tell the difference between SD and HD. My mother can't, and all my efforts to get her to watch the HD versions of all the channels she insists on watching in SD on a £2K Pioneer panel have been in vain. To be fair, from any further out than about 6ft, I have trouble telling the difference, but that's cos the TV's top draw. And secondly, some people are still just too uneducated, too long in the tooth, or just don't care about HD to bother with it. I can't sort of understand that. I've lost interest as I've got older. SD, HD, LCD, Plasma, OLED, 4K Super HD, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, 4K Blu-ray. . . .Someone stop the world, I want to get off.
I watched a DS9 episode upscaled on my Samsung BD-Player last night (season one's "Dramatis Personae"), and I can confirm it looks okay with just a single upscale. It doesn't resemble TNG-HD, but it's not bad, and is still a small improvement on viewing it in a standard DVD player, in my estimation. It'll never be as good as HD, but it isn't bad, exactly.
Some stuff just isn't and will never be out there in HD; Classic Doctor Who (with a couple of exceptions), for one. A lot of concerts too, especially from the 80s, or anything filmed from the ground up on videotape, like Live Aid, for instance. Of course there's also the DGAF quotient out there, too. Sad, sad people.
You don't have to set at 480p, since the native setting will automatically select the resolution of the disc that is played. That way, you don't have to switch back to 1080p for a bluray. As for the 4:3 between 16:9, that also depends on your tv. My player is set to 16:9, not 16:9 widescreen. And my tv is set to show original image, so as to not stretch anything. It does the same for tv-signal, so when an old tvshow is broadcast and the channel decided to air it in 4:3 my tv shows it in 4:3.
Oh, I get that. I'm still buying Dr Who, concerts and other stuff on DVD but if something IS available on Bluray, I get it on Bluray. It seems odd not to...
I dunno, some transfers to bluray have been pretty shit. I don't know if the HD versions of nuWho seasons 1-4 on Netflix are the same as the bluray versions, but some of the sfx looks horrible there. If the HD on the blurays is the same, I'd stick with the dvds. But newer stuff, yeah. I don't see the point in buying the dvd when the bluray is only a few euros more.
NuWho wasn't shot in HD until Matt Smith took over. The Blu-rays of the Eccleston and Tennant series are upscales from the original SD video.
But note that they're upscales from the original SD video (that is, the PAL version). So if you're in NTSC-land, there will be some increased resolution in the HD versions (as our SD versions were downscales).
Yeah, I know, hence me saying some transfers suck. There's a difference between a transfer and a remaster, I believe. That's the way I understood it. And some older movies/tv-shows on bluray look less good then they do on dvd.
After finishing TNG on blu-ray last week, I watched "Emissary" on my 65" Plasma tonight. I really enjoyed revisiting this show after many years, but the messy quality made my eyes hurt. All that detail obscured by artifacts and fuzzy definition. I'm sad to say DS9 looks like crap on a screen of this size.
I haven't purchased the nuWho Blurays yet. I purchased the DVD's as they came out, prior to getting a Bluray player. Upgrades take a back seat - I'll replace them when I find the Blurays cheap. I agree, new DVD's are not much less than new Blurays, although DVD's don't hold their price as well as Blurays.
My ignorance is surely about to show here, but...do those "blu-rays" (the ones upscaled from the PAL DVDs) suffer from the same problem that affects PAL DVD to NTSC DVD conversion? Meaning, on the NTSC version, it slows down a bit, and everyone's voice sounds a bit deeper. (The US boxed sets of Law & Order: UK, for example, have this problem.) Or does this not occur when your end product (i.e. what you're converting to) is a NTSC *Blu-Ray* and not a DVD?
The blu rays (on both sides of the pond) increase in quality in the sense that they're not compressed to fit DVD discs, and are therefore 100% compression and artifact free, and at a higher bitrate to boot. But they then lose points by being mastered for 50hz instead of 60, which means there's a degree of slowdown not evident on the PAL DVD versions. So what they gave us with one hand, they took away with the other.
We're not saying there's NO chance, but there isn't a good chance; if there were, we would have probably heard about it by now.
They might be waiting to see how much money they can get from TNG, but I would buy all seasons but I don't have enough money