Star Trek II on Blu-ray: Nice!

[Mr Peabody]

I have no idea how a TV Show is shot but I would guess in the 60's the master wouldn't be nearly as good as a feature film years in the future. I'll have to check out the reviews of the ST TV Shows, if they are 7.1 that would be pretty wild.

[Woochifer]

I have no idea how a TV Show is shot but I would guess in the 60's the master wouldn't be nearly as good as a feature film years in the future. I'll have to check out the reviews of the ST TV Shows, if they are 7.1 that would be pretty wild.

TV shows from the 60s were filmed using a different film stock than what was typically used during the 80s. The film processes that were used during that time required higher powered lighting and heavier cameras. While they are more amenable to high definition presentation, they also had limitations in what could be captured on camera (i.e., nothing using low light, limited action shots, etc.)

As I said, among the Trek Blu-rays, only Wrath of Khan was rescanned for this release. The others were presumably made from the previous HD master scans.

I find it funny that original Star Trek TV series (that is 20 years older than ST movies) on Blu-ray got much more positive reviews in terms of picture quality than the ST movies on Blu-ray did.

Aside from the difference in the film stock and the cameras, you have to remember that the HD masters for the original Star Trek TV series were only created recently when Paramount released the updated versions with updated visual effects. The HD masters for the Star Trek movies likely date back to their original DVD release.

It has been my observation that NBC does a better job of archiving old shows, and comparitively speaking, older NBC shows always seemed to look better than the other two networks...maybe they had a bigger budget when they originally shot them and used higher quality film, but look at shows like Columbo, Star Trek, Bonanza, and newer shows like the Law & Order franchises... they have always looked superb compared to their syndicated counterparts of the other networks (a lot of old ABC shows look like the doodoo). Maybe NBC didn't do that with their sitcoms, but I saw an episode of Columbo the other day that looked as crisp as any modern TV show.

NBC had nothing to do with this, given that the Star Trek franchise and its film library are maintained and controlled by Paramount/CBS.

It's a shame they didn't do a better job of IV which I find to be the most rewatchable and best of the original movies because it followed more of the Roddenberry ideology than Captain Kirk fights the bad guy in a space battle (Black hat versus White hat) story of number II. Though I liked number II second best of the original movies. 1 and 5 were pretty terrible and III was merely "ok" 6 was quite good too - perhaps the forgotten one.

Given that the current Blu-ray set only includes the theatrical releases, it's likely that another set featuring the "director's cuts" are on the way (in actuality, only Trek I improved the movie by any measure on the director's cut, and the director's cut for Trek VI is actually worse). But, $30 for the Genesis trilogy, or even $65 for all six movies would be a great price, even on DVD. As it is, the Star Trek Blu-ray set comes with all the bonus features from the previous special edition DVD releases, and adds a few new ones. Plus, you get remastered audio that does a lot more of the split surround effect than the DVD tracks, which sounded more like the theatrical tracks and their more monophonic use of the surround tracks.

As I said, Trek IV is a notable improvement over the DVD version. I just think it's a shame that Paramount chose to "clean it up" during the mastering process. I would be curious to see what additional detail can be revealed if less noise reduction was used. Keep in mind that there's hardly a consensus on the issue of film grain. I come down on the side of maintaining the look of the original film presentation, even if it includes a lot of graininess. Blu-ray's higher resolution means that preserving the film grain does not also introduce other artifacts into the image, as was the case with DVD.

IMO, the Blade Runner Blu-ray totally got this balancing act right. It looks clean, yet it preserves the fine detail and just the right amount of film grain. It's a revelation to look at, even though I've seen the movie numerous times in 70mm.

I'm always meaning to build that home theater system one day - with the big flat HDTV screen Sony purchased it's time to explore the home theater system again - But I left AC3 and Dolby surround in the middle 1990's because I felt even the best systems quite frankly stunk poo-poo. After hearing a nice set-up not long ago with some ridiculous $7000 receiver I was mightily impressed by the advancements in current surround sound technology. Let me guess there are still a bazillion different surround sound settings and 250 page manuals on how to operate the remote control?

If you're watching Blu-ray, the audio will be much improved simply because the releases now use lossless formats that allow for full 24-bit resolution. Even standard DD and DTS tracks are greatly improved, because Blu-ray uses 640k DD and 1.5k DTS that are higher in resolution than what DVDs used, yet fully compatible with most standard HT receivers/processors.

If you want home theater done right, you don't need much beyond the capability to decode a multichannel PCM soundtrack and decent bass management. The rest of it has to do with optimizing the speaker alignment, properly EQing the subwoofer, and using the correct settings on your receiver.

Yes, the current batch of HT receivers are as complicated as ever, but you only need to use a small subset of those features if you get everything else right.