Time to shift focus and talk about something a bit unusual here...
surrounding the question of the various recording media we use
in order to have a collection of our favourite shows on hand
to watch whenever we want, and what it takes to believe that
an upgrade to a new medium is worth it.
VHS - Off-Air vs. Pre-recorded
The household VCR using videotape was really the first medium
to ignite the idea that each of us could own copies of every episode
of any favourite show and watch whichever episode when WE chose,
not when the broadcasters chose. When I was first able to view
Star Trek TNG in 1989, it was via satellite, VCR's were commonplace,
and any episode I saw, I taped. My collection grew rapidly.
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A few episodes eluded me, and I could never seem to catch them on
any broadcast. I eventually got to see "Encounter at Farpoint"
and "The Naked Now" by subscribing to Columbia House Video's
Collector Series on VHS. Every month they would send another
tape with two episodes, complete and in higher quality than my own
off-air recording. Nice, but too pricey to be really worth it.
Some months I declined receipt at the post office
for episodes I already had and didn't much like,
but I neglected to cancel outright, as I had
planned to do after the first two tapes, until the collection neared
the end of 4th season. I had about half of the first season in this format,
and pretty much all of the second.
(These strictly followed production order, even placing "Symbiosis"
after "Skin of Evil", if you can believe...)
Quite by chance, as Deep Space Nine debuted in January 1993,
I actually happened to find Paramount's affiliate feed to its
stations just in time to snag the last ten minutes of DS9's pilot.
From then on, I was able to tape Star Trek TNG and DS9 directly
from Paramount. Half of the commercial breaks were filled with ads,
half were 30 seconds of black screen and silence (which would be stretched
out longer once affiliate stations added their own ads).
As I typically find ads extremely annoying, it was relieving to see half
of them go missing during a broadcast! Plus I got to see & tape the official
episode codes. Odo and Worf did a sound check to start each of their respective shows.
Cool.
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Pretty soon, I had a fairly complete collection of Star Trek TNG episodes
in what seemed a decent or good condition.
To DVD or not to DVD
My initiation to DVD came in 2002, not simply by getting a player,
but also by getting a computer that could edit video and create DVD's too,
which wasn't very common then. Although the fad for DVD extras
like documentaries, audio commentaries, and other perks slowly drew me
to re-collect some things I already had on videotape,
improvements in picture and sound quality were not so great
that I felt I had to re-do everything. Unless my videotape copy of something
was some kind of disaster of poor quality or incompleteness,
I wasn't going to shell out to collect it all over again in another format.
VHS was still pretty good by comparison.
I did, however, appreciate the amount of care in both restoration
and addition of plenty of extras that was being put into bringing Doctor Who
to DVD. As this was being done and sold gradually, story-by-story,
it managed to be affordable for the fans, even while the DVD's were still
amongst some of the more expensive ones out there.
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Into this mix came the original Star Trek TNG full season DVD sets.
At the time, the price tag for one of these was hefty... and although, yes,
it was for a full season...
I had to ask myself what I was really going to get for that money
that I didn't already have? A few documentaries on half of the last disc?
I couldn't see much excitement from any alternate audio tracks on
any of the episodes, which offered only two versions of English,
plus English subtitles. Boring. I spent my money on other things first.
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But gradually more and more of my favourite movies and shows upgraded
from worn out VHS tapes to random-access DVD discs, and as DVD prices dropped,
the then-10 Trek movies and the original Kirk-Spock series joined
my DVD collection. I think I got DS9's later seasons next, because most of
the episodes themselves were totally new to me. Great... but I really
thought Star Trek had missed an important trick by always rushing full
seasons to market, and missing out on better goodies in the process.
Why no audio commentaries from cast & crew? Or isolated music tracks?
Bountiful Blu-ray
It seemed the DVD fad had just reached its height of popularity before
there was a new sudden rush to put out another format of higher picture quality discs.
Blu-ray and Hi-def started fierce competition... which seemed to produce
a confusing mess that impressed me not one bit.
I had JUST bought a season or two of classic Star Trek TOS on DVD,
and then the HD version with modified FX showed up, trying to tell me
I was out of date. Hmmph. I didn't think I wanted modified Trek.
Timing seemed WAY off to introduce another new format so soon,
and I steered clear waiting for the new format war to fizzle out.
TNG had always been my favourite Star Trek, so eventually I did take a stab
at their full season DVD sets, with seasons 3 & 4 that I had remembered
being amongst their best. That's as far as I got before I became aware
of the re-mastered blu-ray sets, and how much more was contained there.
Twice the documentaries. Deleted scenes & goodies. A small but growing number of
audio commentaries. And yet another selling point that I don't think
any marketers of these products have taken time to highlight - alternate
language dubs for all the episodes. I don't mean just French and Spanish
that dominate nearly all North American DVD products, but German, Italian,
and Japanese. I caught a German-language broadcast of TNG in Europe once
in the 90's, and it ignited in me a desire to be able to watch the whole
series in German whenever I wanted. I could have that with today's Blu-rays?!
Count me in! Needless to say, it seemed ridiculous to continue collecting
this show on DVD... when it was the Blu-rays that had the stuff to make a media switch
truly worthwhile.
But that brings us to my quest for a player. I knew I had seen some
Blu-ray players with S-VHS connections, which would be perfect for my TV.
But they seemed to have disappeared from the market too fast, and the
latest push was for the player to jump onto your internet connection
and waste who-knows how much of your paid bandwidth to do & download...
(& upload?) ...who knows what. So this upgrade got shelved for a LOOONG time,
until I finally happened to find used models that matched my wants
for next-to-no money. I now have a Sony BD-S350 Blu-ray player.
And the plunge has now begun.
Blu-ray Six
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Season Six was targeted as having the most good episodes that I didn't yet have
on a disc format, so this set is getting my feet wet with the new format.
I guarrantee this will be a very different look at Blu-ray than the usual
spec-filled drool over the picture quality. Hopefully we'll all learn
something new and more unique here instead.
For starters, here's a criterium I'll bet few will have checked.
We'll try looking at the episodes on THE EXACT SAME TV SET upon which
I originally taped TNG season six from Paramount via satellite
when it originally aired. In fact, my tapings typically occurred
a day or two BEFORE the official airdates posted for the syndication affiliates
and plastered on videotapes and disc releases afterwards.
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| Blu-ray HD
| DVD
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Ah ha. Well, this is weird. Keep in mind, I've tried about every
combination of settings I can find on this player, and the best I can
get from it is this: During episodes and deleted scenes,
I have black bars to the left, right, top, AND bottom.
Compared to DVD, VHS, and first broadcast, my picture has shrunk.
I've LOST resolution with Blu-ray, in spite of it being a damn crisp image.
But that's IF I insist on having the aspect ratio looking normal.
I can also get a stretched tall look that eliminates the bars on top and bottom,
but not those on left and right, and it's a very ugly look.
Additionally, the left/right bars are PITCH black while top & bottom (& corners)
are the same dark grey that passes for black in the starfields of the episodes.
So during an outer space optical shot, those pitch black pillars at each side
really stand out.
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| Blu-ray HD
| DVD
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Now, I'm going to have to fault
both the Blu-ray set and the player in combination for this one,
because both contribute. Indeed, I also have on this set all the
documentaries from the DVD version, in original 4/3 aspect ratio
without any restoration attempted, and... presto, these DO fill the screen
with no black bars anywhere.
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| Blu-ray SD
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Without knowing a whole lot about
the video formats that can exist in Blu-rays specs, we can at least conclude
that our 4:3 TNG episodes are sitting in 16:9 hi-def containers in their
Blu-ray files. A much smarter move would have been to put them in 4:3 hi-def
containers. If such things do not exist for the Blu-ray format, it's
a major oversight for the format. If such things do exist, it's a major
waste of data space from CBS, who made these discs.
But I also fault the player, which has outputs for just about every video connection
format common to televisions from the 1990's onwards, which is impressively ambitious.
This player actually does have settings labeled
to take 16:9 videos and display them pan-&-scan-style
on 4:3 televisions, effectively filling the screen. In the case of TNG episodes
on blu-ray, it's only emptiness that I'd be losing, but this setting never seems
to have any effect on any disc I've tested so far. Sony should have tested this
better. I'll call them out on some of their other bad labeling as well, some of which
is confusing as all hell. One setting allows the user to choose between
"fixed aspect ratio" or "original". Huh? Under exactly what circumstances
is a fixed aspect ratio not the original? In case you're wondering, this switch actually
operates the choice between a normal but shrunken screen with four black bars all around,
or the ugly stretched tall one with bars left and right.
Okay, well this Blu-ray set is pretty nice apart from that. Enjoyed all the episodes,
documentaries, audio commentaries. Yes, I can watch with German audio too, six audio
languages in total [English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese].
And you can also change the on-screen menus to these six languages as well,
although the Japanese one is still half-English.
Subtitles are also available in these six languages plus several more North-European ones:
Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Dutch.
But, some additional detractions.
If you try this on a non-hi-definition TV set like my tester here,
good luck trying to READ these menus, whether in English or whatever.
The writing is too small, the resolution insufficient. Knowing the names of the episodes
and documentaries and such allows me to guess correctly, but it's a pain that
it doesn't service hi- and lo-def with DVD-style multi-page menus.
Watch out.
Also bizarre are the episode promos, in scope and presentation. Firstly, why let them
trigger a viewing of the actual episode when they finish? Do they seriously believe
that anyone watching one of these (a) hasn't just finished seeing the episode already anyway
and (b) is gonna get so excited from the promo that they just have to watch the
episode right away? Again? Well, I'll give this set-up a pass for one of the 26 episodes:
"Schisms", which has such an incredibly slow start and non-existent pre-title "hook",
that it really is better to watch the promo first, get an idea of what the episode is all about,
and thus have some motivation to sit through its slow opening long enough to get to the good bits.
Not that I expect I'll remember this before the next time I watch the episode again.
But I must also say this about the promos. One 30-second full audio mix spot per episode seems a bit
underwhelming considering that each broadcast from Paramount to its affiliates in the 1990's
delivered a 30-sec, 15-sec, 10-sec, and 5-sec spot with full audio mix before each episode,
plus after the episode a repeat of the same variety of spots minus the music and narration
- just character dialogue and sound effects - what they called the "production tracks".
That's 8 spots total instead of 1.
We could have had a real smorgasbord here on the Blu-ray.
In fact, season finales often generated extra teaser campaigns over the preceding weeks,
generating even more spots that could also have been included on Blu-ray,
but nope, they're not here either.
Well, I guess my old VHS off-air recordings still have
something over this Blu-ray presentation after all! :-)))
Our expanded reviews of episodes on this set include:
226 "Time's Arrow, Part II" (only the second half of this story is included as the season 6 opener)
228 "Realm of Fear"
235 "The Quality of Life"
236 "Chain of Command"
240 "Face of the Enemy"
241 "Tapestry"
248 "Suspicions"
249 "Rightful Heir"
251 "Timescape"... with Season 6 Rankings
252 "Descent" (only the first half of this story is included as the season-6-ending cliffhanger)
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(regular)
Import
