Mego mention in the Star Trek:TMP blu ray

[mego73]

I was listening to the commentary on ST:TMP and it was mentioned by someone (I think it was the writer of The art of Star Trek, one of the commentary participants) that Decker always reminded him of Dave Bowman in 2001. Then, he said that was probably because he had the Mego 12" Decker and that looked a lot like Dave Bowman too:







and I TOTALLY CAN SEE IT!

[cjefferys]

That mention on the commentary is very cool. And yes, I can see it too.

BTW, how does the Blu-ray transfer look. Word around the internet is that Paramount really screwed the pooch on these, that they basically used older transfers (except for Part II) and then applied way too much DNR, wiping out a lot of detail and making a lot of shots look too artificially smooth and waxy. After all the bad reviews I've read, I've been afraid to buy these Blu-ray discs.

[mego73]

I have a 32" display so these problems might be minimized on my end but TMP (the only one I put in so far) looks fine (the best I've ever seen TMP look). I recently saw HD Trek 2 on Cinemax and it looked great so if the blu ray uses the same (or better) transfer, I'll be glad.

I haven't looked at the other discs yet but I am wondering if complaints of DNR don't take into account the diffusion used on later movies to make the aging cast look a bit younger.

Digital bits had a very even handed review which talked about the DNR. Here's what they said:


"Now... here's the flip side: The other films (besides Star Trek 2) are a somewhat different story, image quality-wise. Here's the thing... when you look at them, they don't look bad per-se. But they're also far from great. Contrast and color is actually outstanding on virtually all of the other films (with the qualified exception of Trek IV, which has somewhat less than optimal contrast). That's not really the issue. The issue is that when these transfers were done, too much Digital Video Noise Reduction was used to reduce visible grain, or some kind of filtering was applied across the board that stripped out too much high-frequency information in the image. Now... the fact is, some noise reduction is applied to EVERY high-def master you see. That's the nature of the business. The problem is, up until recently, how MUCH was applied to Blu-ray was considered a matter of taste in the industry. And as you guys know, from time to time, too much as been applied by various studios for the image to hold up to large screen Blu-ray presentation.

As a result here, with Trek I and Trek III-VI on Blu-ray, a lot of fine detail - the kind of detail that makes an image look film-like or not on large screens - has been scrubbed away. That's not so much a concern if you're watching the films on smaller plasma or CRT HD displays, but if you're someone who likes to squeeze every bit of image quality out of your Blu-rays with display sizes of over 50" and over, you're going to start seeing the problems. And the bigger you view the image, the more it starts to fall apart. I can tell you that at 110", film grain is almost completely gone save for very coarse grain in select effects shots, and that looks rather muddy."

Bottom line, they said it becomes an issue for people with larger, 50" plus screens. So, with that info (and my 32" screen that I intend to keep for some time) I was not worried about the quality of the movies (and again, think that other people assessing the quality are not taking into account how the movies were actually filmed. I seemed to remember signs of diffusion when I saw these at the theater.)

Here's another review of the trilogy pack (which only has trek 2,3 and 4). They put up some screen grabs

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDRe...gy_blu-ray.htm

[mego73]

I've upgraded to a 37" TV now and from that size to me TMP looks pretty good, WOK looks great, SFS looks good, TVH looks awful, TFF looks good, TUC looks good but on this one the DNR does stick out like a sore thumb. Overall, it looks sharp except for the skin detail on the actors faces (a symptom of DNR but also possibly of the way they were filming the older cast).

So, for me, the only one that is unbelievably sub-par is Trek IV, it only looks a little bit better than the DVD.