Not at all. I had just never heard it called the 180 rule before. Cheers.

I was having a root around Play.com and saw that the TNG HD sampler is also being released in Region 2 for the Princely sum of only £7.99.

*sigh*

I expect for the price of a Starbucks sacrifice for the week I'll end up getting it to get a better idea what the REAL results of this work look like through my Blu-ray player and HD TV.

Ya know ya want it suckas. [Side-by-side HD remaster/SD-DVD comparison footage]

(I got my copy preordered. Figure it will only set me back a couple shrimp burritos).

Bonus!

I was checking out some upcoming titles on my LoveFilm subscription and they will be stocking the Blu-ray sampler to rent. So I'm just gonna do that instead of buy it, since if I did decide I liked it and wanted to repurchase TNG itself on Blu-ray, it would just become a dust gatherer anyway.

That said, I may then still wait until the inevitable 'complete' Blu-ray box set in a couple years time. Which - knowing Paramount - won't be released until after all the individual season sets have. That would give me a while to afford the no doubt ludicrous potential cost of the thing.

It would be nice if home video was still in demand by then. Do we even have a 'complete' TOS BluRay set yet? I stopped paying attention after I bought the season sets. I think they should have a complete TOS set with the eps all in production order.

I won't lose any sleep if they never get to TNG seasons 6-7 because nobody was buying them. Just give me 1-4 in HD and I'll be happy.

As far as I know in region 2 there is a complete TOS Blu ray set that sells for about 115 quid. The one with non remastered versions also available. But I dont know if the episodes are in production order or not.

I only have the R2 individual season sets of TOS-R which are in aired order. That in and of itself annoyed me a bit as well since the final VHS versions of TOS were released in production order on video. So I never knew why they couldnt go on the dvds in the same sequence. I still dont even know why 'The Cage' was included on the season 3 set and not the season 1.

Unless for the blatantly obvious one that it aired twenty years after the rest originally were broadcast.

I suppose you could argue much of the novelty of seeing 'The Menagerie' is lost if you've already seen 'The Cage'. That was my experience anyway. I had already seen 'The Cage' (restored version) broadcast in fall of '88 as part of a cynical commercial effort to assure viewers that TNG S2 was still coming eventually (it was the year of the writer's strike).

And yet 'The Menagerie' is part of the 'untouchable' classic TOS... if anything is going to get relegated as 'bonus material' it will be 'The Cage'. And 3rd season is the shortest in terms of hourly content.

However, technically 'The Cage' has been categorized as episode 1 ever since the VHS days, so a 'proper' full series set should have it up front. With Gene Roddenberry's 1986 intro explaining what it is you're watching.

Of course then it would have to be the black-and-white version, because Roddenberry just got through saying so. Only how many new fans would select that version? Most of them will watch the remastered version, which is on an alternate 'seamless branching' track with the restored version.

Might be easier to just keep it at the end, so nobody 'freaks out' and wonders just how many hours of TV they might have to sit through before Kirk shows up. Oh, but then wait a minute... why is the first ep numbered as '2'? We're already missing an episode. We'll be totally lost!

Maybe we just need to keep them scrambled, and just let the sets and wardrobe turn all 'wacko' for that one third ep. Sh*t... I think I've just rationalized why that will never change now.

Oh well...

Thedigitalbits has a review up. And here are more images as well.

Ah, so there has been some digital tweaking of planetscapes at least then? I'm assuming to render more detail into them (that's one area where some planetscapes in early TNG do tend to fall down a bit, probably even in comparison to the remastered TOS planetscapes now) and texturing?

"Digitally-enhanced planetscapes"... I guess that does imply fresh rendering. I had just assumed he was talking about digital recompositing. I wonder which is the case and to what degree the editor is in the know.

(Reading some of the old DVD reviews for TNG, one might get the impression early CG was already being utilized during production on a regular basis. And I'm not even completely sure myself if that wasn't the case)