Bill Hunt's initial thoughts on Star Trek HD DVD

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Another example of how HD-DVD's limitations are causing issues with the quality of their releases.

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To make things even more challenging, CBS/Paramount's Star Trek: The Original Series Remastered - Season One showed up yesterday on HD-DVD. Now... I'm a huge and life-long Trek fan, and I'm not one who's opposed to this whole remastering process. So I've been quite looking forwarding to seeing these episodes in high-def on disc. Given all that, I'm not going to rush this review, because I really want to take the time to go through everything in detail. But I do have some quick initial impressions that I wanted to share with you today.

First, the packaging is a lot smaller than I expected. The discs all slip into this little Digipack affair that's not much bigger around than the discs themselves, and that in turn fits into the clear plastic outer case. Smaller is a good thing in my book, in terms of conserving shelf space (especially since this set doesn't replace the previous TOS: Season 1 DVD set). Unfortunately, upon opening the case, the first sight that greeted me was Disc One of the set all scratched to hell, despite the fact that it was secure in the packaging. Thankfully the disc seems to play okay, but I've only had time to watch one episode on it. So far no combo disc problems - fingers crossed. I must say, I still dislike that these are combo discs though, because there's no disc labeling. That means to find the episode you want to watch, you've got to consult the packaging to see which disc it's on. That gets old quick.

When the disc starts up, you take this little animated trip in a turbolift to the transporter room. Once you get to transporter, things are good, but the trip itself is a little repetitive. Thankfully, while the actual menu interface you select options from is a little confusing at first, once you figure it out (it only takes a minute or two) it's pretty great.

Speaking of extras, the only bonus feature I've looked at so far is the starship fly-around option. It's fairly easy to navigate, but there's not a lot of depth to it, so it gets boring rather quickly (although seeing little tiny crewmen through the ship's windows is a nice touch). The Billy Blackburn archive footage is the real treasure here, and it's definitely what I'm most looking forward to checking out, so more on the extras later.

The one last comment I wanted to make however pertains to the video quality. I was expecting to be blown away by remastered TOS on disc, and at times I was. But I was also expecting the quality to be significantly improved from the high-def broadcasts, given how much better the video bit rates should be on disc, and I wasn't so much. I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why that would be - because it shouldn't be - other than that the video may have been compressed a little too much to fit these episodes on to the HD-30 portion of the combo discs. Each disc seems to have three episodes plus some extras. The first episode I watched was Where No Man Has Gone Before. And I have to say, I was a little surprised to see what looked like compression artifacting during some of the effects shots. I couldn't help wishing that there was a Blu-ray version on BD-50 discs to compare it with. Now... I don't know how much of a difference that would realistically make, because most of the studios that do or have supported both formats seem to use the same video encode for both formats for cost reasons, which means the video bitrates for Blu-ray are always reduced because of the need to accommodate the disc space available on HD-DVD. In any case, forget Blu-ray - I was still really expecting to be dazzled by the HD-DVD image, and I'm not. Don't get me wrong: This set still seems to be quite good overall. A lot of hard work has obviously gone into it, and as I said I want to really take the time to give it a fair shake. But so far, I'm just a little bit underwhelmed. I'm sure that will be spun like crazy in various quarters online, but so be it. It can't be helped, I suppose. Anyway, I'll keep looking and report in more detail later.