I have to say I am disappointed with this release. I didn't expect amazing results given what they had but it's basically just DVDs released on Blu-ray.
Red to Blu I think this article gives a clue as to why the first few series won't look great even with the up-scaling work done. I imagine the later series 7 and 8 will look better. Though the Doctor Who blu-rays have looked pretty great considering. It must be said though that season 19 looked at it's best when it was the film inserts filmed on location that actually look true HD.
Going by the article, it sounds like the blu version should look a bit better than the DVD version. They go to great lengths to emphasize how the new magical upscaling tech is much better than a player can do, but I would take that with a pinch of salt. Sure, there are better upscaling algorithms out there, but when going from 480p video tape which was several generations down from the original rushes, then no amount of magical upscaling can inject more detail into the picture than was present at source. There may be fewer uprezzing artifacts, but that's about it. More promising is global color matching between scenes and episodes. This will improve the look as will other fixups like video dropouts, damage, film artifacts and clean-up of excessive video noise. Amazon sells it for $24.50.
Reports are coming in that there’s an authoring error on “Series 3 disc 1 - all episodes. Series 5 disc 1 - last 3 episodes”, but the BBC has not yet acknowledged an error, so any announcement of a recall/replacement plan is a long way off. What precisely the mistake is, is not yet clear. People say the frame rate seems wonky on only those particular files. Red Dwarf: Series I-VIII Bluray Review
I didn't have much time to check, but I've looked at a few episodes of Series 3 and I see no problems with jitter or de-interlacing. I compared with the Series 4 and they both look the same to me. However, I use a PC drive for blu-ray discs and a software player, which plays whatever fps/encoding .etc. I didn't see any issues on Series 5 either. In my opinion it looks pretty good, all things considered. I suspect people with hardware players may see different results. I'll wait for a confirmation from BBC.
