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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

> original retail price $118 for just season one

Well, there's your problem right there. Expecting three figures for a single season of anything is just pure madness.

I think my shock price is roughly in the ballpark of 15 to 20 USD per season, and a maximum of roughly 100 USD total for an entire show.

Yes, this means if a show lasted more than 5 to 7 seasons I expect a discount on the remastered version!

I want an online version that will exist for at least 10 more years preferably 20 for $100 with the DVD copy, sold by one of the giants with the budget to sustain that.

Back in the 90s, Trek episodes were released in the UK months before they were on TV. The price was typically £12-14 per video, which had 2 episodes on. That puts a season at £170. Inflation wise that's about £320 now, or $422 a season.

How many people bought an entire season for that price is another matter, but that was the asking price.

I did :) all of TNG Season 3-7 .. all of Voyager until DVDs came about

Voyager season 1

  US release: Jan 95
  UK VHS release: Jun 95
  UK TV release: Sep 96

I find it so amusing that Americans complain about having to pay $10 a month for Discovery

This. I bought the first trial disk for Star Trek TNG, which had a couple of episodes that had been redone in HD. They looked great, but when I saw the price for each season, I ended up not purchasing them.

That and remastered(or so I thought... I think they're in 4:3 aspect) episodes being available on Netflix makes it really hard to justify paying at all for discs.

The show was originally shot for 4:3, that didn't change when it was remastered. Thank goodness. It was very impressive remaster, as shown in various comparisons:

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/observations/tng-r-changes...

The film that was shot couldn't simply be overscanned to 14:9 or 16:9. It would work in some scenes, but in others there were bits of the set/booms/etc visible almost upto the actual frame that was cut out. The only way to convert is therefore

1) Throw the top/bottom parts of the frame away

2) Stretch the frame

Neither is acceptable.

Agreed. Of course, there have been more than a few remasters that didn't bother to concern themselves with such trivialities. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer remaster is an example of how you can thoroughly botch framing[0] when converting between aspect ratios. At that point, you might as well see what else you can screw up as well. At the opposite end of the spectrum, David Simon wrote a really interesting--and even-handed--blog post[1] about HBO's remaster of The Wire that converted to 16:9. He points out examples of scenes that work out better in 16:9 and those that...don't. Even when the conversion is made in conjunction with the original filmmakers, it's still a different version of what was originally intended and necessarily involves compromises.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F28XcxHxH6k

1. http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

Showing vampires in broad daylight without catching fire, for one thing. (Not applying blue filter to simulate moonlight, for shots taken in daylight but which were supposed to be at night.)

Wasn't that the HD terrible remaster, rather than the 16:9 SD terrible remaster?

YES

An update to [0] was posted in the last day or so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

Depends on the market.

Japanese DVDs/Blu Rays for Anime sell for upwards of $40 and usually only include around 4 episodes.

Worth every penny I paid for them.

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