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Bonanza Season 2 Video is Kinda Terrible

post #1 of 9
12/14/10 at 11:46am
Thread Starter 

maybe its the source material, but these disks, if they are remastered are not great. Maybe because I'm watching these at 65" screen and Up, that I'm dissapointed. Very scetchy image quality on this release especially from Paramount. Why does B&W on older shows like the Fugitive always look spectacular and early color shows always look like crap.

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post #2 of 9
12/14/10 at 12:15pm

There's more picture information to handle in color and I guess these old TV shows just weren't ever meant to be watched on such big screens, even if the ratio's still set at 4:3, but luckily they still look good on my old 32" tube... Haven't ordered my Bonanza set yet, plan to do so next month.

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post #3 of 9
12/14/10 at 12:31pm

You are exactly right. Compared to season 1, season 2 is not nearly as good. The colors are over saturated.
The contrast is not that good either. Shame on Paramount. On the back, it says brilliant picture. If they think
that picture is brilliant, what can we expect in the future.frown.gif

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post #4 of 9
12/14/10 at 1:25pm

Bear in mind back when these shows first came out the most expensive TV Sets had screens roughly 24'' in size as measured diagnolly. Today most of us are watching these shows on Screens at least TWICE that size! One of my Sets has a setting I call the "Mill Creek Mode" which is roughly 18" across diagnolly. If a DVD I'm watching is of low quality (As many of Mill Creek's PD "Shovelware Sets are), I place the Screen in this mode and watch it on the smaller size.

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post #5 of 9
12/14/10 at 2:05pm

I have a 42" set, and sometimes it's a bit hard to watch DVDs. You have to move back a bit, I think. But if it's truly cruddy, and it sounds like this is, then there's no hope for it.

 

I've been watching The Virginian first season on my big set, upscaled from a ps3, and as long as I'm sitting a bit away it actually looks surprisingly good. It's far from a blu-ray, obviously, but the source material was in good shape for The Virginian I'm guessing.

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post #6 of 9
12/14/10 at 2:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by HenryDuBrow View Post

There's more picture information to handle in color and I guess these old TV shows just weren't ever meant to be watched on such big screens, even if the ratio's still set at 4:3, but luckily they still look good on my old 32" tube... Haven't ordered my Bonanza set yet, plan to do so next month.

But most of these old TV shows were filmed using 35mm stock which *should* provide a very good image *if* the source print/negative were used.  I do not know for sure about Bonanza but would be suprised if they used 16mm stock.
 

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post #7 of 9
12/14/10 at 5:29pm

Maybe we got the royal treatment with season 1, but the return on investment wasn't enough to repeat the effort, so we ended up with older masters for the second season. Oh well...mine should be coming in soon.

 

I remember watching the so called "Lost Episodes" on the family channel back in the late 80's early 90's after Pernell had left. It will be good for me to see these earlier seasons.

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post #8 of 9
12/15/10 at 6:29am
Thread Starter 

Well Paramount's quality is all over the board, perry Mason looks fantastic, the fugitive is pretty darn good, Gunsmoke and alot of their B&W shows are grainy messes, could be the source material, but season 1 looked fantastic after that season 2 on have been less steller. These Bonanza eps also suffer from Interlacing issues. I usually encode all my sets for playback on my Ipad and Phone and Apple TV, and this is the first time that a lower quality encode looked better than the source, once I interlaced it properly, but your right the colors and gamma on this set are way off. Alot of episodes from this year are on the many PD releases that this show had over the years. I think some of those looked better on the PD Releases. If Paramount is gonna charge us a bit more for split seasons then invest that many in at least making them look good.

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post #9 of 9
12/18/10 at 10:09pm


 

Originally Posted by smithb View Post

I remember watching the so called "Lost Episodes" on the family channel back in the late 80's early 90's after Pernell had left. It will be good for me to see these earlier seasons.


Fortunately those "Lost Episodes" (that subtitle was since removed for Hallmark Channel reruns in this century) are in excellent condition, and I also prefer the later seasons of BONANZA.....except for the final season after Dan Blocker's death when the writing suffered as well.

 

Yet these early years are so widely circulated as it is, I'd be more interested in again seeing the post-Adam episodes.

 

Unlike CBN Cable so many years earlier, Hallmark butchered their copies though.  There were at least 5 minutes missing from each episode of BONANZA.

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