When it comes to primitive broadcast resolution from NTSC, all of you are correct. In order to fully appreciate the great costumes, and its color, created for DS9, the series needs a facelift; upgraded for 4K and beyond.
Only if taken from the original 35mm negs.
It'd be worse if they recorded natively from video camera, where "
Never
The
Same
Color" got its initials from (not to mention the glorified edge sharpening "AI" tactics, which look great but don't add detail*), but if they edited on numerous machines where they converted the film to an analog VT signal, you'd likely end up with similar problems as how often they were re-calibrated makes for a fun question, noting that the original broadcast master and DVD of "The Arsenal of Freedom" (as I recall) had a ghost image of the 7 color bar calibration image****. If they had the same film stock and exposure settings, under controlled lighting, etc, then you'd get perfect consistency between every angle/camera change.
I'd be happy with 2K ala TNG as well...
* take an AI upscaled VT scene frame, original VT scene frame, and a native film scan frame at the same resolution. Shrink the 35mm and upscaled VT to the native 480i/480p resolution and the upscaled VT will look largely identical to the original VT frame. The modern enhancements DO have some merit**, but they're by no means perfect, especially when higher density native media is used. The more dense the native material is (even 2K video), the more one can do - before artifacts like jagginess, blurred look, etc, start to become noticeable. Back in the days of print media, you'd never go lower than 150DPI and 300DPI was the print standard, but that didn't stop some publications from putting out a full-size magazine page that looked like jaggy trash anyway, but that was when digital cameras were new only only starting to be more widely used - a very long time ago when the transition started...
** now take your AI upscaled VT frame and place it next to the native VT resolution given a generic resize/stretch via bicubic, unsharp mask, fine contrast adjusting, and/or other techniques... AI will look rather better but telltale signs are still there. I'm still impressed by what can be done, even with shifting and enhancing the color gamut with as little blooming or crush as possible (which is still there after a point). Going from a higher density media downward is always going to be easier and more successful than artificially boosting a low quality source to a higher level. Especially at 480i (which each field in a 2-field frame is more or less equivalent to "240p", doubled up with alternating lines, as a form of temporal dithering (never mind motion blur due to interlacing artifacts between fields!), to simulate a sharper frame than what it truly is... never mind 480p (or deinterlaced 480 and compensating for motion blur issues) stretched to a height 4.5x...
****
https://www.thedigitalmediazone.com/2018/05/29/diy-tv-calibration-for-the-best-picture/
(RGB and CMYK never looked more delicious...
)
