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Comment by psim1 | Hacker News Reader

Star Trek demonstrates the changing times pretty well.

For the Original Series, the producers were just starting to explore color television and they used the whole pallette.

1990s Star Trek feels more "natural" to me: warm where you expect warmth (ship's crew quarters, hot planets), cool where you expect cool (Borg ship), fairly neutral otherwise, though some of the sets did have an office-park vibe to them.

Current Star Trek, specifically Discovery and Picard, are about as gray-blue and washed-out as ever.

The pictures in this tweet show it perfectly: https://twitter.com/ShelfNerds/status/1481452739754405889

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It is sort of funny to read over that and think that the best (filmed) shot in the whole set is the first McCoy from the 1960s. Though the 90s Trek fares well too, certainly. One might call the 90s Trek "dull" or "perfunctory", but it works.

It occurs to me I'm watching Stargate SG-1 right now, which also has a color grading similar to 90s Trek, and now that I think about it, it's almost a relief. Here I've got this HDR 4K OLED display and it seems like everybody's all like "Hey let's use half-ish of the color gamut of NTSC". I've rejected monitors and laptops for having only the capability of displaying that color gamut and here professionals are using it voluntarily. As a valid choice every so often, sure, like someone else mentions Young Frankenstein in out-and-out black and white, but all the time, everywhere, as the solution to every problem? Come on!

I think McCoy also benefits from the first shot being exterior. The contrast between him and Crusher is less if you compare the #4 and #5 shot. Some of the difference in character there is due to very different depth-of-field 90s TV didn't seem to use much narrow depth-of-field for some reason (maybe narrow DoF on faces had become associated with soap-operas at that point? Just a wild guess).

> For the Original Series, the producers were just starting to explore color television and they used the whole pallette.

More that the producers had to deal with that fact a significant chunk of the audience only had black and white TVs. Even on color TVs the broadcast would crush colors. So they had to use bright colors that would differentiate characters despite being the same "uniform".

Look at The Cage, all the characters had the same color uniform so everyone sort of blended together except Number One. Shatner and crew were much easier to differentiate in black and white, especially when red shirts beamed down with the principal cast.

Haven't seen Picard, but Discovery is the absolute worst I've seen for "modern" color. Everything is slammed to orange or blue/teal. It's like smiley-face EQ for colors.

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