I would be perfectly happy with the DVD releases if they'd been done right, because I watch Magnum, P.I. on a standard-definition CRT TV, the same as I did when it originally aired. DVD quality (when done right) is beyond NTSC broadcast quality, so it's more than enough to max out the potential of a 15 kHz CRT, especially when you use a component (YPbPr) connection (which gives the best possible color resolution and separation). For movies I always want the Blu-ray and I watch them on an HD projector, because they were originally intended to be seen projected onto a big screen, but old TV shows just don't seem right to me on anything other than a CRT TV.
The problem is: only the first season on the first DVD release is done right. Maybe the second season is done right too, but I don't have the original DVD release for the second season; I only have a crappier later release (the full series set that was released in 2013). For the original single-season releases, I have seasons 1, 3, and 7, and of those, only season 1 looks particularly good. Furthermore, season 1 is pretty much pure film-source for every episode, while season 3 has some episodes that have a lot of video-source mixed in with the film-source, and some episodes that are simply 100% video-source; in other words, very sloppy, inconsistent, outdated, and low-grade mastering.
In addition to the problems that the original releases have, the 2013 full-series release makes it even worse because they drastically reduced the bitrate. For example, with the first season, original release, each episode was around 2 GB. With the 2013 release, all the episodes are around 1 GB, which is way too small for ~48 minutes of 720×480 MPEG-2 video + 192 kbps audio. I've compared screenshots from my own DVDs and the 2013 one is full of compression artifacts and it's missing half the film grain. That sort of "quality" is for YouTube or inept pirates, not for official DVD releases from a major studio. I assume they did it so they could use cheap DVD-5s (single-layer) instead of DVD-9s (double-layer). When each episode is only around 1 GB you can fit 4 of them onto a cheap DVD-5. Can you imagine a studio releasing a 3+ hour major movie like Titanic (1997) on a DVD-5? It would never happen. Old TV shows (and the people who purchase them) get no respect from the studios it seems.
The only reason I'd be interested in a Blu-ray release would be to re-encode them to better quality DVD-resolution than you get with the official DVDs. However, I don't like the sound of this at all:
Coligion wrote: ↑Tue Jan 11, 2022 12:19 am
This Mill Creek release is already going to be the least amount of total discs at 30 compared to the U.K. release at 37 and the French release at 31, i.e. much more compression and lowering of overall video quality.
It sounds like they've done the same thing with the US BDs as they did with the 2013 DVDs.