Red Dwarf: Pre-Bluray Dave HD upscale comparison

[DragonQ]

Not sure if anyone is aware of this but before the upscaled Bluray box set of series 1-8 was released in 2019, a lot of episodes were shown on Dave HD. These are also upscaled to 1080i/25 but seem to be from before all the other stuff that was done for the Bluray box set, e.g. colour grading, video noise reduction, contrast boosting (resulting in some black crush), and cropping.

Not sure I’ve seen these mentioned anywhere else so I thought I’d post some comparison screenshots. I don’t have a DVD source to compare to but I’d suspect these are essentially the DVD masters upscaled? It seems like the earlier series had more “tweaking” done to them than the later ones. In fact, you can see in the last comparison that the lights on the right side have more video noise in the Bluray version. Not sure if that’s just because the noise is reduced by blur in the Dave HD version or they used an inferior source for the Bluray release!

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[Moonlight]

I still don’t understand how often this type of remaster will crop the image on all four sides for no apparent reason.

[Podey]

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

[Ben Saunders]

I do find this very interesting and look forward to later developments. I much prefer the Dave screenshots when shown side by side like that, they’re a little noisy and yellow for sure but the Blu-Ray seems to overdo it, and I understand what “crushed blacks” are now.

[DragonQ]

Yes, most obvious example of crushed blacks is in dark hair, e.g. comparison 3. No idea why a lot of scenes are cropped unnecessarily – some have a bit of black edge to them but when the whole thing is 4:3 in a 16:9 frame anyway that would only ever be noticeable at the top and bottom.

Rimmer’s face in comparison 2 is the most obvious example of poor contrast boosting, IMO. His face looks super shiny.

[Ben Saunders]

I know from watching endless amounts of Classic Who that there is often some sort of nonsense going on at the border of the picture, random green lines, little bits of blackness or distortion. But to crop those out would only take a tiny bit of zooming in, and I’ve never noticed it in Dwarf really (it could be there, though). Perhaps it’s a too-heavy-handed attempt to make sure none of those artefacts creep through, or maybe the image isn’t perfectly 4:3, or something. Is the cropping completely consistent between shots? There must be some reason for it. Somebody ask Doug at the next convention.

[Author]

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