star trek on blu-ray

All the original Star Trek movies (1 through 6) came out on Blu-Ray today in one large collector’s set. Normally I’d be really excited about something like this, but I’m pretty meh about the whole thing, and am gonna pass on this and wait for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is, I don’t like “collection” packs. I prefer to buy stuff individually, and avoid them wherever possible (for movies, at least). Plus, it goes without saying that Star Trek V and Star Trek VI are painful to watch. The first four are the only ones worth watching, and I actually like Star Trek III quite a lot myself for some reason. Wrath of Khan is undeniable, of course. Ah, heck, I like em all. 🙂

Another reason is they didn’t do such a great transfer on them. It looks like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the only one that they went back to the original film and did an HD transfer. All the other ones, they just took a current digital copy and cleaned it up. Double meh.

The third reason is, this is Star Trek … and Paramount has a long history of milking fans for all the money its worth by dangling a barebones release then coming out with a much better package later on in the game. Just look at Star Trek: The Original Series on DVD for an example. I think it’s been released three times, and it just barely came out on Blu-Ray too.

So, me, I’ll be a-waitin for the individual films. And a better HD transfer.

One thing is certainly for sure, though … if TNG, DS9 or Voyager ever get Blu-Ray releases, you can bet your bippy I’m gonna snatch those up in no time flat. I’ve been watching Deep Space Nine on and off, and they really did not do a great job on the digital transfer — they used a really low compression level for it, and I can always see blurring on it, even on my old 27″ CRT (480i). That’s pretty bad. By comparison, I’ve been watching season five of Voyager recently, and on my HDTV, the picture is still very nice. They did a good job on it.