DS9 on blu ray?

Peach Wookiee · Jul 8, 2017

Yeah, they need reasonable prices for the show. It's not that fans are cheapskates...we have other commitments.

kkt · Jul 9, 2017

Tomalak said:
That wouldn't really qualify as a remaster. I wouldn't spend money on something my Blu-ray player can do adequately. It's a full remaster as for TNG or nothing in my view.

Yes. If they're not going to do it right, they should stay home. Spending money on a half-ass upscale would only delay a full remaster.

Mage · Jul 9, 2017

BillJ said:
They explored this option for TNG. It looked like ass (there is a feature about it either on the sampler or season one Blu-ray). There simply aren't many folks who are going to pay for a half-hearted attempt.

There are a few episodes where the simply couldn't find the original footage for several seconds, so they had to do that method of upscaling/remaster for those few moments. It's very noticable in the episodes, and whole series 'remastered' like that would look shit.

The thing is, with modern tv's, old shows can look ok. However, the factory settings on tvs have so many software enhancements set to on, it really fucks up the video-quality. I have a 49" UHD Samsing tv, and with all those settings turned off, DS9 and Voyager on Netflix are pretty doable.

Tomalak · Jul 9, 2017

^ Yeah you have to turn off all the edge enhancing and motion smoothing or else everything looks like daytime TV on cheap videotape.

Mage · Jul 9, 2017

Tomalak said:
^ Yeah you have to turn off all the edge enhancing and motion smoothing or else everything looks like daytime TV on cheap videotape.

Exactly. And it goes for a lot of stuff. With all the settings to on, I watched some UHD shows on Netflix, and it looked way to crisp and juttery. It was just to clean and sharp. It looked horrid. I know more people that aren't a big fan of the UHD thing.

jaime · Jul 9, 2017

Tomalak said:
^ Yeah you have to turn off all the edge enhancing and motion smoothing or else everything looks like daytime TV on cheap videotape.

Motion smoothing works well on some things...I prefer watching enterprise with it set to on, because it makes it more totally similar to the earlier shows lol.

DS9forever · Jul 9, 2017

I've ordered three of the documentary Blu-rays and am thinking of buying the complete DVD series (even though I already have the 2003 & 2007 UK releases) - trust me CBS - this is one Niner whose wallet is open for DS9 Blu-ray!

DonIago · Jul 9, 2017

If I thought the new DVD set was in any way an improvement on the old one in terms of disc quality, I'd probably go for it, but my understanding is I'd just be double-dipping.

A Blu ray set though...hell, I'd pre-order that one if it would make a difference. Or contribute to a Kickstarter, or whatever... For gods' sake, take my money!!!

Jayson1 · Jul 9, 2017

DonIago said:
If I thought the new DVD set was in any way an improvement on the old one in terms of disc quality, I'd probably go for it, but my understanding is I'd just be double-dipping.

A Blu ray set though...hell, I'd pre-order that one if it would make a difference. Or contribute to a Kickstarter, or whatever... For gods' sake, take my money!!!

I shouldn't be saying this but I actually got hold of some DS9 blu-ray's. I can't say how I got them but if you give me access to your credit card so I can take fair compensation for them and I promise you I will mail you the disks within 6 months.

Jason

DonIago · Jul 9, 2017

^Oh yeah, that sounds like a really winning plan...

Would you like my Social Security Number as well?

Jayson1 · Jul 9, 2017

DonIago said:
^Oh yeah, that sounds like a really winning plan...

Would you like my Social Security Number as well?

That won't be needed. If you could get hold of some of your neighbors Social Security Numbers that would be helpful though. Also if anyone asks why you need that info just tell them your a cop undercover investigating social security fraud and you think that they might have been targeted.

Jason

drew · Jul 10, 2017

BillJ · Jul 10, 2017

drew said:
There are at least 3 versions of TNG in HD as well.

They are all the same version, just repackaged.

The question of spending the money is that it is a finite resource, and CBS has to make choices based on what they believe to be the most profitable projects.

Balok's Decoy · Jul 10, 2017

Repackaging is also just another way of re-marketing. I don't think it's a coincidence that new DVD sets of DS9, VOY, an ENT blu-ray set, and a mammoth combined TOS series/films collection all came out at or around the 50th anniversary.

Qonundrum · Jul 12, 2017

Balok's Decoy said:
I think you just identified the problem though. The TNG remaster didn't sell very well or make CBS that much money. And when you're a business considering a similar follow-up project, making back more than your investment is the ultimate deciding factor. I think you're absolutely right that people are just watching the TNG remaster on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, etc. They're not buying the blu-ray and clearly CBS isn't making back their investment on the remaster from either blu-ray sales or whatever it is they get from streaming services' licensing agreements.

And if you give people the option of watching it in HD or SD, a lot of people are just going to shrug and pay less for SD. That'll cut into the profits on the remaster even more. What people need to do is buy the TNG, TOS, and ENT blu-rays. Not on eBay or from friends or whatever. Buy them from Amazon or directly from CBS or Best Buy, what-have-you. They need to make a profit on this if we're going to have any hope of seeing DS9 and VOY in HD.

Or even then.

Streaming/broadcast licensing will catch up in time.

The rest of the market isn't going to go back to 480i SD and if customers are buying 1080P or 2160P (4K), why would they want to steam SD? It's like buying a car that can do 300MPH but you're only puttering around on a road where you can't go more than 45MPH before the cops come in.

True, number of customers is an issue... but in 1989, "Doctor Who" was canceled and the BBC got even richer by licensing novel/book deals since 1990, because those were far cheaper to make than the TV show and it kept people quiet since they didn't want a redo of the outrage that took place in 1985's cancellation (a word later retracted and replaced with "hiatus" due to the outrage and outcry). Novel quality got incredibly bad after four years or so, but that didn't stop people from saying "Book quality sucks but if we keep buying enough that'll show an interest and the BBC will make a new season."

And sure enough, they were right. Only sixteen 16 years later, the BBC had made a new show because lots of other dead properties were being "rebooted" and people tuned in for a while to get happy on the nostalgia bandwagon. And aimed it to every possible audience - except the fans buying the novels since to this day fans are belittled at every turn on Doctor Who forums because casual viewers mean more for ratings and they don't want the show to get axed again... (Just how big a facepalm emoticon exists? Triple its dimensions and then it might then almost fit the big picture...)

(Oh, the less said about the 1996TV movie the better, but as with 1989 the BBC wanted virtually nothing to do with making it because it cost too much and in 1996 the "let's revive dead properties and coast off of empty nostalgia" fad hadn't started yet...)

Jayson1 said:
Couldn't you make up those cost though in something like a online option were people might want to pay a little extra to have access to the HD versions of the show?

I know on my Amazon firestick if you want to rent or buy a movie you can either get a HD version or SD version that is a little cheaper. I wonder if one of the reasons why the TNG disks didn't sale better is because people were simply getting the same quality of visuals through streaming. Maybe people were spending money on those updated visuals but not in the traditional way people use to do when they started going for DVD's over VCR tapes.

Jason

Actually, numerous studies have shown streaming is of lower picture and audio quality than disc and we'll pretend that streaming services offer the same titles that can be purchased on home video disc - for which even today many titles aren't included, or get discontinued, which has prompted customers to quit, since streaming services profits have gone down so that's got to be one of many reasons...

Streaming is just a glorified rental with lower picture and sound quality, but back to the main point: I've sat through streaming with video frames removed so once- fluid videotape sitcoms now have what looks like stuttering 15fps (film is 24fps, BTW) frame rate and far more MPG compression than the DVD counterpart... more colors bleeding out of edges, especially reds... it depends on the individual show, some are compressed in a way that almost makes a genuine fight between platforms. Unfortunately, most shows and movies are done generically - but most television isn't expensively-created art to begin with so why would they care?

Think that picture on the 4k set on a $500 TV looks great? Ignore how they're using isolated, carefully crafted content because seeing what it truly looks like under real world conditions would do more to detract in many cases... 4K blu-ray is too new and not yet accepted, and 4K streaming - what's been available for years - still ends up being lower than the old-school 1080P blu-ray (google "blu-ray vs 4k streaming for a surfeit of sites, of which some do provide visuals pointing out compression artifacts, softer edges for a "higher resolution" video, jagged edges for a "higher resolution" video that pretty much end the claim of "streaming is the same (or better)" very quickly... still, I've read reviews for "Simpsons" blu-rays where the reviewers amusingly write how it looks better except than the DVD (except for where they unwittingly mention the soft or jaggy lines and moire that are clear signs that videotape was upscaled as opposed to any true remastering to get at the genuine resolution and color detail people rightly expect from "HD") then people aren't going to notice lots of things.

But should everyone be an expert in the field of field interpolation? (bad geeky joke) Probably not; they have other expectations and not wrongly so and not everyone's a geek to begin with...)

I will say this about HDR 4K sets - apart from the calculator that shows that, to benefit from 4K in terms of pixel density, you need a ginormous 70" set to sit some 4' away from to actually see the improvements in true 4K over 1080P - they do change the histogram to artificially improve on the color, for which you might find "white blooming" or "black crush" as obvious giveaways of phony manipulation as opposed to a genuine gamut.

Tomalak · Jul 13, 2017

CutieMcWhiskers said:
True, number of customers is an issue... but in 1989, "Doctor Who" was canceled and the BBC got even richer by licensing novel/book deals since 1990, because those were far cheaper to make than the TV show and it kept people quiet since they didn't want a redo of the outrage that took place in 1985's cancellation (a word later retracted and replaced with "hiatus" due to the outrage and outcry). Novel quality got incredibly bad after four years or so, but that didn't stop people from saying "Book quality sucks but if we keep buying enough that'll show an interest and the BBC will make a new season."

And sure enough, they were right. Only sixteen 16 years later, the BBC had made a new show because lots of other dead properties were being "rebooted" and people tuned in for a while to get happy on the nostalgia bandwagon. And aimed it to every possible audience - except the fans buying the novels since to this day fans are belittled at every turn on Doctor Who forums because casual viewers mean more for ratings and they don't want the show to get axed again... (Just how big a facepalm emoticon exists? Triple its dimensions and then it might then almost fit the big picture...)

Well that's an interesting, if highly distorted view of reality. Is it satire?

drew · Jul 13, 2017

BillJ said:
They are all the same version, just repackaged.

The question of spending the money is that it is a finite resource, and CBS has to make choices based on what they believe to be the most profitable projects.

You believe they had a bunch of unsold copies lying around, took the discs out, and put those discs in new cases? They were reprinted b/c they sold. Let me explain something:

There is some unknown ratio of those who buy TNG season 1 to those who leave a review of it on Amazon. It doesn't matter what the ratio is, we don't need to know it. It's a safe assumption that it isn't considerably different from the ratio of those who buy Game Of Thrones season 1 to those who will leave a review of it on Amazon, for example. Or Walking Dead, or Mad Men, or Dexter, or Sopranos, or X Files, or Twilight Zone, to name a few.

The number of reviews left for TNG season 1 on blu ray is similar to all of those shows' first seasons, being most outclassed by Sopranos which has 4 times as many reviews and thus, most likely, approximately 4 times the sales and popularity. Game Of Thrones has about 3 times as many reviews. The other shows mentioned have less or about the same amount of reviews. I really don't think that selling a quarter of the units that the supposed best show of all time has sold is doing anything close to "poorly."

To accept the idea that TNG hasn't sold well, you must either accept the implausible idea that a higher percentage of those who bought it left a review on Amazon compared with the percentage of buyers of other series, OR that most of those shows, including The Walking Dead, are also "bad sellers."

I don't really need evidence of how popular the show is though, just look at this forum and imagine what a small percentage of us are actually on here still talking about such old shows. They recently re-released DS9 on DVD. Sold out of the old ones?

It could be a very good thing though. Maybe they're gauging interest. Maybe they'll compare the sales figures to sales figures of TNG dvds and calculate how much they'd likely sell in DS9 blu rays based on TNG's blu ray to dvd sale ratio. It other words, if the DS9 dvd release sells half as much as the TNG dvd release, they can expect DS9 blu ray sales to be half of what TNG's blu ray sales were.

Now here's a very interesting fact: The most recent dvd release of TNG complete series was in 2016 and has 236 reviews on Amazon. The 2017 re-release of DS9 complete series on DVD has 372 reviews on Amazon already. This is very likely b/c TNG already had a whole series set released on DVD though which has over 500 reviews. The individual season sales are about twice as high for TNG assuming that twice the amount of reviews is a good indicator. Buying DS9 DVDs would probably do it though, I'm sure we all know someone who could use a little DS9 for their bdays or other holidays. A lot of ppl on here seem to think that buying blu rays of the other shows would work better but I really think DS9 dvds are the better approach. Sorry for the tangent. No way is TNG a poor seller.

BillJ · Jul 13, 2017

drew said:
No way is TNG a poor seller.

Someone posted numbers several years ago, that showed TNG on Blu-ray was indeed a poor seller.

Selling complete series box sets for $50 or $100 (US) wasn't what CBS had in mind when they released the show with an MSRP of $129.99 per season. Retailers took a bath on the sets. Marking them down and keeping them down. After season four, you couldn't find the sets at brick and mortar retailers. Because no one was buying the prior seasons and they were still sitting on the shelves.

Amazon still has original season copies available for about a fourth of the original MSRP. Right here is season seven for $29.59...

https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Ge...r=1-12&keywords=star+trek+the+next+generation

Not exactly what CBS was expecting when spending millions remastering the show.

Tomalak · Jul 13, 2017

BillJ said:
Someone posted numbers several years ago, that showed TNG on Blu-ray was indeed a poor seller.

Selling complete series box sets for $50 or $100 (US) wasn't what CBS had in mind when they released the show with an MSRP of $129.99 per season. Retailers took a bath on the sets. Marking them down and keeping them down. After season four, you couldn't find the sets at brick and mortar retailers. Because no one was buying the prior seasons and they were still sitting on the shelves.

Amazon still has original season copies available for about a fourth of the original MSRP. Right here is season seven for $29.59...

https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Ge...r=1-12&keywords=star+trek+the+next+generation

Not exactly what CBS was expecting when spending millions remastering the show.

Yep. I believe season one had the highest sales of any of the Blu-ray sets, as it was the only one that really had any marketing and there was a strong curiosity pull factor.

Using notoriously unreliable Amazon reviews isn't a great idea in any case, as they tend to merge reviews for completely different products with similar content - for example, a review of an album may include reviews of standard CDs, deluxe CDs, downloads and vinyl. Some reviews of the Star Trek films include the original barebones DVDs from the late nineties. Amazon reviews aren't a great measure for sales of a certain product.

Look, the biggest evidence is the whole point of this thread. If TNG-R made a shit tonne of money, CBS would naturally have looked at how they could continue to make shit tonnes of money out of the remaining Star Trek estate, and accordingly remastered the remaining two series. They didn't do that. I'd invite anyone to draw their own conclusions.

BillJ · Jul 13, 2017

Tomalak said:
If TNG-R made a shit tonne of money, CBS would naturally have looked at how they could continue to make shit tonnes of money out of the remaining Star Trek estate, and accordingly remastered the remaining two series.

Exactly. You already had a working group who were getting better and better at the process. Why disband them if they were making money?

DS9 on blu ray?

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