Me, too. I've popped in an episode just to get a taste of the quality (I watched the battle sequence from "No Surrender, No Retreat"), and it's about what I hoped. Live-action scenes have a nice improvement in detail, though there's still a quality loss in composite scenes (mostly, all the film grain disappears, as does fine detail), and the CG is oddly muddy and sharpened (I expect it's a 24 frames to 30 frames to 24 frames thing, but not quite as ugly as what the same issue caused on the DVDs). I'm going to do a quick proof-of-concept test on a frame to see if it's at all possible or practical to combine the DVD and Blu-Ray to get an HD-ish widescreen version.
(Which involved me breaking out my first-run DVD sets. God, they really put it all into discs back then, didn't they? The individual silk-screened art on each disc. The non-overlapping spindles so it's not a pain in the ass to take out a specific disc. A little booklet with a nice note from JMS and contents for each disc, including special features. The Blu-Ray doesn't even tell you which episodes are on which disc, you have to make an educated guess which episodes will be on "Season 4, Disc 3.")
And now, through the magic of not hitting "Post Reply" because I got distracted by my rip finishing, I've done that, so here's what I've got. It wouldn't be as easy as I hoped (the proportions aren't identical, there's some distortion from when the film was scanned, so the frames don't overlap exactly from both sources, and the color-correction on the DVD is a little more contrasty than the Blu-Ray, so there's some clipped highlights on the widescreen version, and overall adjustments need to be made to match the color and brightness). I'm sure there are tools and techniques to do this (like, people used the same idea to make the "despecialized" versions of the Star Wars movies, though three movies is a lot less daunting than a hundred and ten episode. WB would probably decide to do a professional widescreen edition long before I made a dent in a fan-edit remaster).
Anyway, since people will probably be interested, here's what I came up with and some comparison images I made of both sources so you can see the quality difference. The frame is from "Points of Departure," the second season premiere.
First off, the test image merging the two sources. I upscaled the DVD frame using an AI tool, color-corrected it as described above, and added some grain, while softening the border between the HD frame and the widescreen one:
It could be worse! Now, the quality comparisons. Here is a straight split image, comparing the DVD and the Blu-Ray (the DVD is on the left, if the pillarboxing on the right doesn't give it away). Because I am cruel to old technology, for these images I scaled the DVD screencap up without any interpolation, so it'll look pixelated rather than just blurry.
Sheridan is noticeably taller on the Blu-Ray. It turns out the widescreen version (at least in this shot) also expanded the frame vertically. This next one zooms in the DVD screencap a bit more, so they line up properly, even though it crops out some of the DVD picture. Check out the fine detail on the HD side, like the EA logo on Sheridan's belt buckle, or the ribbing on the light panels on the wall.
And, finally, I uncropped the above image, eliminated the split-screen and put a red outline around the Blu-Ray screencap, so you can see how the framing is different. To be clear, I've done this with one frame of one episode, I won't say this exact difference applies to every shot in every episode, some may have more information on the bottom in the widescreen version, some may even be cropped in vertically on the DVD, as
an ancient website analyzing the first widescreen releases of B5 proposed. This comparison also shows what I mentioned about the proportions being distorted on one or both sources; the bottom of the frame lines up (take my word for it, I know they overlap and you can't see) but the top doesn't.
